PTV: Performance TV – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

TV is dead – or do we live in post-television times? Can everybody have their own channel today? PTV: Performance TV is an experimental performative programme using the format of a TV studio. Its starting point is the urge to examine the impact of the medium and its idiom on current artistic practices

We have invited contributions from contemporary artists employing media such as opera, TV series, talk shows, documentaries or video clips – as well as artists who proclaim that television is dead, demonstrating that it is the internet which has now taken over its role in society.

The autumn television schedule of PTV: Performance TV will be produced in two parts. Television programmes will be broadcast terrestrially through performances, discussions and screenings at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, as well as online via a dedicated YouTube channel for works that use the internet as the medium of choice.

In Chapter 4, the duo Małpeczki(Maria Magdalena Kozłowska and Maria Toboła) will take us on a journey through the stomach to the heart in their unpredictable chef show You Must Eat This! In the select company of the artists that the Małpeczki have invited, we will abandon ourselves to the consumption of tasteless jokes and indigestible experiences. In a performance-video presented as ‘Kitchen TV-series’ artist Anja Carr appear as a very fast anthropomorphic cat with white gloves inspired by Disney – demonstrates how to make seven different absurd dishes. From September until December, the serial discussion club Reality Forum will be run by the East London Cable collective. Each month, the group, founded by Wojciech Kosma and June Berlin, will run screenings and discussions, aiming in the long run to transform the genre described as ‘unscripted television’.

• Previously on PTV
  • In our Death Cafe encounter, we talked to Oreet Ashery about online death. Together with researchers of post-performance and queer TV, we reflected on how the world could be changed by means of the video camera, and whether television had anything in common with conceptual art. With the help of the Dream Adoption Society, we explored the virtual space of Locus Solus. Transformalor took us on a trip to a furniture shop, where he explained to us the principles of how the Repro-Techno-Tribe functions. In the last episode, the famous American choreographer Jeremy Wade became a female nurse, whose queer talk show devoted to caring policies turned out to promote the society of the future. Marta Ziółek evoked the mystical world of Pamela, an incarnation of the contemporary trickster. The final touch was the premiere of Wrixling, Michael Portnoy’s experimental artistic therapy which he has been conducting with a group of performers. The Wrixlers claim that ‘when life gets complicated, we get even more so.’ Dominika Olszowy has managed to record all this and more in her PTV studio!