„Nature Morte” – interviews with artists

 

In their book, „The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future”, Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway predict that decades will need to pass before we are able to assess the significance and accuracy of artistic diagnoses of climate catastrophe – by which time it will be too late to change anything. And that’s a shame because, alongside scientists, it is artists who are likely to be the most far-sighted „alarmists”, even if their arguments are at risk of being suppressed and marginalized. With that in mind, we have decided to ask three artists participating in „THE PENUMBRAL AGE” exhibition – Alice Creischer, Susanne Kriemann, and Antje Majewski – about another „alarmist” and pioneer of thinking about climate in art, namely, Joseph Beuys.


While Beuys is an important name for the Polish art world, his ideas concerning politics, activism, the economy, and the need for systemic change have never reached a wider audience here. His diagnoses weren’t always accurate, of course, and he wasn’t always able to avoid difficult issues related to his position as a shaman-artist, but engaging with his art can still teach us much about what Susanne Kriemann calls the „crazy conflict” we are involved in as witnesses to an unfolding catastrophe.


In these three interviews we have tried to bring together the ecological reflection of the 1970s which, thanks largely to the engagement and radicalism of Beuys, has been a key point of reference for several generations of artists in Germany, with a contemporary perspective that has verified the effectiveness of certain gestures and is helping find new contexts for practices that had been prematurely abandoned. The resulting conversations aren’t about Beuys, but rather outline the artistic strategies linking the respective practices of Susanne Kriemann, Antje Majewski, and Alice Creischer and „Nature Morte”, the performance we are staging at Teatr Powszechny. Or, to put it even more broadly: they document a certain moment when artists working in different contexts are asking themselves

how to live and make art with the awareness that we need radical change now.

 

 click below to download the publication:

 

 

 

 

The spectacle Nature Morte is being produced by Teatr Powszechny im. Zygmunta Hübnera in Warsaw under the project „Beuys” thanks to the support of Fundacja Współpracy Polsko-Niemieckiej (the Foundation of Polish-German Cooperation).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teatr Powszechny
im. Zygmunta Hübnera
ul. Jana Zamoyskiego 20
03-801 Warszawa
tickets 22 818 25 16
22 818 48 19