Residencies
Simone Rueß
An artist working with social memory, in a series of conversations with people connected to BWA Katowice, both currently and historically, including current and former members of the BWA Katowice staff, will carry out a series of artistic and research-based activities focused on the institution’s individual and collective memory. The artist will draw mental maps of the people she speaks with. The meetings will provide an opportunity to share individual memories of BWA Katowice. Together, we will map relationships with the space over time, experiences of art, and the evolution of social and institutional relationships.
The project was initiated as part of KONGRES ESTETYCZNY — a year-long exhibition and performance programme aimed at updating the formula of the art institution, realised through a variety of complementary artistic languages and tools, with the participation of artists and curators. The primary point of reference, and at the same time the starting point, is BWA Katowice — an institution embedded in the heart of the city’s urban and social fabric as a tool of social engineering. The modernist pavilion, now a listed architectural monument, is a contemporary of the beginnings of the Polish wave of institutional critique. The need to update it, both spatially and ideologically, becomes a starting point for a discourse on the meanings and dynamics of the art institution understood in universal terms. For the duration of the project, the main exhibition space will be transformed into a year-long art laboratory. Historical works will enter into dialogue with entirely new ones, forming a collective reflection.
In the BWA Katowice space, barely visible inscriptions and pencil drawings can be found on the gallery walls. They are traces of the artist’s conversations and meetings with members of the institution’s staff — the memory of its walls.
curator of KONGRES ESTETYCZNY — Łukasz Trzciński
Simone Rueß is a visual artist whose practice focuses particularly on urban space and the observation of architecture in the context of its social functioning. She studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. She was a DAAD scholarship holder and a resident of the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2013). Her work has been presented in numerous exhibitions, including at Studio Gallery and Le Guern in Warsaw, and at Dom Utopii in Kraków, where she developed the “New Topographies of Nowa Huta” series.