Jan Moszumański-Kotwica
Othering. A Study of Pressures
Produced specifically for the Project Room space at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Othering. A Study of Pressures is an exhibition by the multimedia artist Jan Moszumański-Kotwica. It was inspired by the noise-music concerts/performances that the artist organizes under the alias of Death Wind. The name points to one of the recurring themes of his art – the movement of air.
As in the Death Wind shows, so in Othering audiences can feel this movement on their own skin. What distinguishes the exhibition, however, is the use of language. The wind is not just an instrument here, but also a solo voice. In the film presented at the heart of the show – on a screen stretched like a sail – the wind warns against the overexploitation of nature, people fight against natural disasters, and their attempts to control nature come to nothing. Appearing as “props” in the Project Room are recordings from Tanzania and Uganda, where Moszumański-Kotwica was working on a documentary about the Kampala music scene. The exhibition is on view from 4 July through 11 August 2019.
Sound artists Hugo Esquinca, Freya (Elvin Brandhi), and Jan Moszumański-Kotwica as Death Wind will perform during the preview, on 4 July 2019 at the Workspace, in the north-western tower of the Ujazdowski Castle.
Othering. A Study of Pressures is this year’s third instalment in the Project Room exhibition series, which presents young-generation Polish artists. All exhibitions are site-specific and premiering. In 2019, the series kicked off with Marta Krześlak’s Party at the Artists’ Club and continued with the Last Train to Warsaw by the Fashion House Limanka. Coming up later this year are premiering projects by Wiktoria Walendzik, Horacy Muszyński, and Róża Duda and Michał Soja. In January 2020, an international jury will award two prizes – of 20,000 PLN and 10,000 PLN – for this year’s two best shows.
Jan Moszumański-Kotwica (b. 1990) works in the media of film, sculpture, and sound. He has studied fine arts at the academies in Kraków, Oslo, and Malmö. His main preoccupation is with the emotional and aesthetic landscape of contemporary ideological systems (e.g., the role of the sublime in conditioning social needs and its interpretation in public memorials, or the commoditization of the experience of fear in nineteenth-century horror literature, i.e., the affinity between fog and smog). In Death Wind, a “Sturm und Drunk, anti-singularitarian, new romantic, multisensory black noise show,” he challenges the romantic notion of the relationship between man and nature. He is currently working on the film Nyege Nyege Tapes Tapes, which documents the Ugandan electronic music festival Nege Nyege on the fiftieth anniversary of the Woodstock Festival. He occasionally assumes the alias Jan Moss. Selected solo exhibitions: A Primer for City Dwellers, Kraków (2017), Noplace, Oslo (2017), Hotel Pro Forma, Copenhagen (2016); selected group shows: Ghetto Biennale, Port-au-Prince (2018), Kunstverein am Rosa Luxemburg Platz, Berlin (2016), Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2016), Futura, Prague (2015), National Gallery, Ulaanbaatar (2014).
