KATARZYNA (KASIA) SLOBODA
Since 2009 I am involved in curating and researching practices of contemporary art, choreography and improvisation in the context of exhibition making and participatory projects. I have edited several publications on dance, choreography and contemporary art.
I have a Ph.D in dance studies (thesis: Embodied attention in contemporary dance practices in the perspective of critical dance studies / Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw // supervisor: prof. Krystyna Duniec). I was teaching classes at at the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the University of Łódź (curatorial practices, dance/choreography/performance).
Currently I’m an Assistant Professor in curatorial studies at the Art Academy in Szczecin. Between 2009 and 2022 I had been a part of curatorial team at the Modern Art Deparment in Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz.
I am a member of AICA - International Association of Art Critics, as well as Board Member of Forum Association of Dance Art Societies and Common Space collective. Between 2019 and 2022 I was a member of CIMAM - International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art. Together with Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, Ola Knychalska, Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga and Kasia Właszczyk developed How to touch movement? Social choreographies, performance and queer feminisms as world-making kem school programme.
I am a recipient of Grażyna Kulczyk fellowship in the field of contemporary choreography and Młoda Polska scholarship (2018). In 2018 I was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Dance Studies / Roehampton University, London.
Following the experiments of the avant-garde sculptors, this exhibition examined the behind-the-scenes findings and consequences of the fascinating modernist discoveries regarding the relationship between space, movement and body. Our guide here was Katarzyna Kobro herself and her artworks which were shown against the works of her contemporaries, such as: Naum Gabo, Alexander Calder, Barbara Hepworth, Antoine Pevsner, Jean Arp, Isabelle Waldberg, Alexander Archipenko, and Julio Gonzales. Above all, we asked a question about how artists, while experimenting with the materiality and plasticity of time, space and dynamics of the rhythms of the human body, reflected the complexity of the experience of modernity. We were also able to analyse what exactly characterised their search for new relations between abstract form and movement, as well as what visions of the relationship of man with the environment they proposed.
Kobro claimed that the dynamism of our motor skills can be captured through the rhythm of consecutive moments of movement and stops taking place in space and time. The sculpture was for her a model of a new harmonious order of everyday surroundings, tuned to the optimal psychophysical coordination of human activities. The result was to be rationalised social behaviours whose purposeful organisation was governed by emotions of planarity– the term and concept proposed by Kobro. Herself, apart from the Spatial Compositions, she also sculpted the Nudes to which the women she knew or she herself had posed. In the works captivating a human figure with a delicate and tender schematic, we can also find the influences of space-time rhythms on the body itself. The exhibition thus combined these two seemingly separate themes of her work, showing the flow between the daily rhythms of the body and its surroundings.
Following the ideas of creators who want to break free from identifying a sculpture piece with a solid and a closed form alone, the exhibition also problematised the issue of the movement of receivers of art. It was accompanied by performative tours encouraging viewers to look again at the ways in which they engage their body and senses in the reception of the composition of the exhibition and the works exhibited there.
The exhibition publication included reprints and revised translations of Katarzyna Kobro's texts and articles, as well as selected statements contributed by other sculptors (including Barbara Hepworth, Georges Vantongerloo, Naum Gabo) and several papers by contemporary researchers, including Carola Giedion-Welcker, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Alex Potts and Megan Luke who addressed the issues of avant-garde sculpture and its relationship with space, corporality and movement.
More on the book: https://www.artbook.com/9783960986591.html
You can find more photos here.