10—23/09/2012
exhibition
Bui Sisters (Julia & Mai Bui-Ngoc)
Density
- Sisters dancing with senses
- The exhibition of the Bui Sisters Density in the {Bank Pekao Project Room} constitutes an invitation to travel through a labyrinth of senses. Basing on their various artistic experiences from the borderland of video, theatre, dance, sculpture and architecture, Julia and Mai Bui have created a vision of a mysterious, luminous microcosm, the exploration of which takes place primarily with the sense of hearing, sight and touch. Upon entering the exhibition room you will step into a fairytale land only to be immediately entwined by bright colour ribbons hanging down from the ceiling just above your head. Additionally you are surrounded by sounds coming from every corner of the room whereby your childlike curiosity is your only guide.
- The labyrinth of wires and strings hanging loose – in some places very densely – from the ceiling. Pictures of characters of various sizes designed for these transient walls. Sounds produced by different musical instruments coming from various sides of the room. This is Density – a project prepared by the Bui sisters especially for the {Bank Pekao Project Room}. Entering the room, going through the walls made of soft wires and strings, coming across pictures which keep appearing and expanding, the visitors perceive the exhibition as a truly physical experience. Naturally, the project is to have an effect on the visitors’ senses, to stimulate their synesthetic circulation, participation, while subtly challenging their conviction that they walk around the world of fixed dimensions and distances.
- In a way this is what the Bui sisters have been doing in their videos and films for years: they question the certainties of human perception, play with dimensions, genres, Newton’s laws of motion. Julia Bui-Ngoc and Mai Bui-Ngoc, whose mother is Polish and father is Vietnamese, join these rather distant experiences and put them into one. Dedicated to theatre and dance, Julia was studying under Professor Grzegorz Kowalski at the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where she joined "Kowalnia", i.e. an informal group of artists founded by Kowalski [kowal means a blacksmith in Polish, so kowalnia would be a blacksmith’s workshop], where in the 1990s as well as afterwards a number of leading Polish artists have developed their talents. After graduation from architecture, cinematography and television studies, followed by an intense career of an architect, Mai set off on her 1.5-year-long travel around the world. Three years ago the sisters established an art team which deals with art, theatre, cinema and advertising. Sometimes they cooperate with other artists – in this case with Jarek Jóźwik, music writer.
- Questioning perception certainties seems to be one of the major goals of the two artists’ work – both when in their video clips they play and present the characters as small Gullivers in the land of giants, or when in the theatre they tell their actresses to go through the door one by one and enter the screen, thus blurring the borderline between the real world and the virtual one. The big and the small, the real and the pretended, the high and the low mix with one another. Shooting models from above often makes their bodies look like puppets, rag dolls or computer game characters. The Bui sisters also play with film genres. The atmosphere of the noir blends with the scenes of passion, while rising suspense leads to nothing. In some of their advertising productions the tandem sometimes uses quotes (such as long, round shots by Rybczyński). What emerges from their works above all is the concept of the theatre. The belief that we live in parallel worlds and that we can easily slide even from the most dangerous and dramatic reality into a puppet show or fantastic world of comic books.
- Curated by
- Fabio Cavallucci
The project was implemented with the financial support of Bank Pekao.
Media partners
