Joanna Leśnierowska – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

Although the principle of ‘blur’ has been introduced into the tradition of European painting already by da Vinci’s sfumato-technique, it is however only after Gerhard Richter (in whose work the phenomenon of out-of-focus and hazy images took such a dominant role) that the blurred surface has become one of central motives in both figurative and abstract paintings as well as photography and post-photography of nowadays. Artists employ the means of blurring intentionally, in different combinations, and following different conceptual and technical strategies. Blurred surfaces, dissolving contours, hazy appearances, indistinct motifs in a state between apparition and dissolution, chaotic accumulation and constant overdose of equally important and unimportant details, dispersed visions and meanings, and aspects of color and composition brought to the fore - with all this in mind, we entered the stage to examine possibility of ‘blur’ in the context of body and choreography.

• The research for the solo has been developed with an input by artists of different disciplines. Together, we have searched for translation of  ‘blur’ into all levels of a stage performance. ‘Blurred’ we understood literally - as something ‘out-of shape’ or ‘unable to keep one shape/form’, but first of all metaphorically – as visual and physical representation of an emotional and mental state in which we are being deprived of previously recognized and generally accepted point(s) of reference, and, both on a micro and macro level, constantly exposed to fragmented reality made of data of all sorts: bits and scratches of images, sounds and (post) information sunk in noise and echoes of ideas and ideologies.

blur is another chapter of Exercises in Looking – a practice of seeing and thinking with (moving) images initiated with a trio …(rooms by the sea) (2014). Stemming from the interest in contemporary painting and (post) photography, it is inspired by its theory and creative and political strategies, and  examines a  possibility of  restitution of the gaze in the context of the stage.