Artist Paulina Olowska presents a site-specific theatre performance within É«¿Ø´«Ã½â€™s collection displays. ‘The Mother An Unsavoury Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue’Ìýis an adaptation of avant-garde playwright StanisÅ‚aw Ignacy Witkiewicz’s play from 1924. The story takes place in a bourgeois setting in which hallucinations, schizophrenia, alcoholism, madness and drug addiction turn into surrealist mayhem. Two professional actors play the role of the mother and the son, while Olowska’s friends and collaborators take on characters including the maid, the prostitute, the aristocratic party boy and theÌýsuspicious individual.
Olowska transforms a room in the Poetry and Dream collection display into the theatre set which is open duringÌýthe day as an installation. The room becomes a domestic interior inhabited by works by artists including Meredith Frampton, Dora Carrington and Henri Matisse and shows Olowska’s continued interest in the appropriation of histories and the function of painting as a fictional space.
This film file is broken and is being removed. Sorry for any inconvenience this causes.
Installation view, The Mother An Unsavoury Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue 2014, É«¿Ø´«Ã½
The Mother An Unsavoury Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue - performance shot
The Mother An Unsavoury Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue - close up of characters
The Mother An Unsavoury Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue, 2014,
About the artist
Working in painting, performance, installation and curating, Paulina Olowska’s work often focuses on forgotten figures of feminism, minor histories, and popular aesthetics, quoting period fashion photography, agitprop posters, graffiti, periodicals, and signage. She recently had solo projects and exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Basel and Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw (2014) and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2013). She lives in Krakow, Poland.
She and the artist Bonnie Camplin presentedÌýUsher WeÌýat É«¿Ø´«Ã½ in 2008 in The Tanks, and Olowska’s film Welcome to the Exhibition (2005) was screened as part of the symposiumÌýPerformance Year Zero: A Living HistoryÌýin The Tanks, É«¿Ø´«Ã½ in 2012.
Commissioned and produced as part of , network for performance practice. Corpus is Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao), CAC Vilnius, KW (Berlin), If I Can’t Dance (Amsterdam), Playground (STUK & M, Leuven), and É«¿Ø´«Ã½ (London; as part of BMW Tate Live). Corpus is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.