PTV Party – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

• The PTV Party will open with a retrospective of  Dominika Olszowy TV. The Friday evening show will also feature the hundredth concert by Nagrobki (Maciej Salamon and Adam Witkowski), who especially for the PTV will provide a live sound track for the startling Polish TV series The Moomins.

Dominika Olszowy PTV

• The Dominika Olszowy television programme devised especially for Performans TV is a unique take on Warsaw’s artistic community, in the artist’s idiosyncratic style. Popular TV formats have received a new lease of life thanks to their exceptional presenters: Wanda Sport, Laura Raflezja Arnolda and Kasandra. Olszowy has invited to her studio these familiar together with other less well-known figures from the local art scene, constructing unhurried programmes imbued with melancholy and humour in the spirit of Slow TV. Olszowy’s camera records the artists at work and asleep, making Karolina Plinta impersonate a visitor from the Orient, and – for the first time ever – shows the tragedy of the burnt Tenderness, such is the magic of the small screen.
• The artist’s project, which draws on many TV formats and styles, comprises three parts, although there have been rumours about hundreds of hours of footage that have not found their way into the official selection.
• Episodes are available on PTV YouTube channel.
• Dominika Olszowy makes works at the juncture of different media, combining video, performance, sculpture, installation and stage design. She graduated in the video studio of Professor Marek Wasilewski at the Faculty of Intermedia at the University of Poznań. She has created the ephemeral Sandra Gallery and was a co-founder of the radical hip-hop group Cipedrapskuad. She is a co-founding member of the motorbike club Horsefuckers M.C.

Nagrobki play The Moomins part 3

• The group Nagrobki will provide the sound for the animated film created on the basis of the Polish TV series The Moomins, a customised version that bears little resemblance to the original story by Tove Jansson. Although the setting and protagonists remain the same, the storyline is radically different. Moomins are not, accordingly, what we assumed they were and, in the absence of a narrator, the images replaced by the group’s improvised music acquire quite different meanings.
• The members of Nagrobki are Maciej Salamon (guitar, vocals) and Adam Witkowski (percussion, vocals). The music is an idiosyncratic blend of guitar noise, cold wave, beat big and early black metal. As might be expected from a group called ‘Nagrobki’ (Tombstones), all the song lyrics work the themes of leaving things behind, passing away and death.