Jan Domicz, Benjamin Hirte, Studio for Propositional Cinema and u

EVERYTHING IS BIG, SOMETIMES MONSTROUS AND REALLY INTENSE

Wschód, Warsaw
16 July - 20 August, 2022

Wschód is pleased to present a group exhibition EVERYTHING IS BIG, SOMETIMES MONSTROUS AND REALLY INTENSE, which proposes scaling down everything in ratio 1:20 apart from the projectors.

 

Jan Domicz is visual artist, author of videos and objects. In his works, he uses narrative potential of a space and its socio-political implications. In the exhibition he is presenting a video Elevator and a kid in a model of his former Staedelschule studio in Frankfurt, where the video was exhibited during Rundgang in 2015. At that time he was illegally living in the same space.

The video work shows the elevator in a residential building, where a teenager is asked to move his leg back and forth. He triggers the sound of a motion detector and stops the elevator from use.

 

In his work, Benjamin Hirte detaches standardized details from their architectural or linguistic contexts and transfers them into the exhibition space, where they function as signs referencing their genesis.

His video First Houses is presented in a model of a viennese gallery Layr where the artist had a solo exhibition entitled First Houses in 2020. The video was projected onto the wall in the last room of the gallery space. The eponymous First Houses, one of the first social housing programs in the US from the 1930s, only appear once in the video. Following the classical logic of the slide show, the video strings together various images of New York’s infrastructure and buildings – especially the Lower East Side, where the artist used to live. The slide show format feeds into a rather documentary reading, whereas the motifs seem surreal. The technology here is not classic photography, but a 3D scan app for the iPhone […]. The artist’s intervention is of course ultimately photographic, but it is the technology of the app that causes the various errors or violations of the original scanned objects and locations.

 

Studio for Propositional Cinema was inaugurated in 2013 with a public call to action. Through language, actions, sounds, and images, through production, publication, exhibition, and fictions, they seek to reconfigure culture from a network of ideological formations into a dialogue of hypothetical gestures.

u is a project space run by Sean Morel who explains: In its most essentialized form, “u” is an element of language; it pre-exists us and accrues meaning through interaction. u is part artist, part arena—a transferable personal alias, and a social space for collaboration. Its physical form is always a minature gallery space made out of transparent tape.

Studio for Propositional Cinema opened a show in u on July 9, 2022 and now decided to present u in Warsaw with a promise of a projection onto its wall.

 

The show is co-curated by Office for Narrated Spaces.