Blue Box
Common Places and Contemporary Artistic Practices
Blue Box. Common places and contemporary art in contemporary artistic practices is an artistic-curatorial project built around issues regarding the importance and meanings of actions undertaken by artists in relation and response to the significant definitions of the place and situation (site-specific).
Partaking in the project are artists, curators and researchers in four locations: Chișinău (Alicja Rogalska with Vladimir Us from the Oberliht Young Artists Association), Kyiv (Daniel Muzyczuk, Michał Libera and Igor Krenz invited by the Izolyatsia Foundation), Warsaw (Anna Ptak, s project’s curator and in collaboration with Maja Bekan), Tbilisi (where Iza Tarasiewicz is being hosted by Nini Palavandishvili, GeoAIR), and Minsk (Karol Radziszewski, invited by Lena Prents, in collaboration with the Ў Gallery). The Blue Box project will be implemented in a collaboration that is geographically connected by the history of the Soviet bloc, although the problems which the Polish artists – invited to the project by local organizations – will confront are defined by the state of necessity arising from contemporary challenges and disparate trajectories, which unfolded the fate of the erstwhile universalist socialist idea.
The starting point of the artistic micro-case studies and interventions are the spaces of social interaction recognized as well as created by the regimes of different eras, and the infrastructure of interpersonal communication: urban parks, experimental films, playing chess, artist’s studio. How have these spaces been transformed by the modern market and political assumptions as well as everyday life? What, therefore, can the work of an artist reveal in the context to which they refer, and what remains obscured, sometimes by the same structures that support art? What tensions are produced between the spatial dimensions of the identity of these "common places"? And how is cultural policy created between micro-level artistic interventions and a wider field of international circuits?
The project’s title refers to the blue box (chroma-key) technique: image processing for television, film, video games and to the very idea of the circulating images of popular culture. Blue box is based on a simple principle: the environment, in which the acting character is found, is erased and replaced by a picture in which the protagonist has never been in before. What interests us in the project are the relationships between three plans: space that has been imagined through artistic interventions; a space of artistic practice in its current institutional entanglements; definitions of space beyond artistic intervention. Individual projects will be carried out in Georgia, Moldova, Belarus, and Ukraine, from March till August. The finale of the project will be an exhibition in Kyiv in November of 2016 along with a joint publication.
