Between Swimming and Dryland

2019

installed at part of "Worlding it Otherwise or Else", Bärenzwinger, Berlin Bärenzwinger, Berlin (photos (c) Marlene Burz) ; and part of the solo exhibition "Between Swimming and Dryland" Kunstverein Reutlingen (Photos (c) Karolina Sobel).
.
plaster, metal, acrylic paint, wood, 140 x 120 x 50 cm.

The form of this work was originally based on the plans of the project space of its original exhibition. The "Bärenzwinger", literally meaning "bear enclosure", which housed between one to three bears until 2015. The small cramped compound was my starting point for this collapsible paper theatre, and became a stage for a dislocated human body that transformed and inflated to the maximum boundaries of the site. The encompassing moat become the arms, while the ears, hair and genitals wander the halls like ghosts.
.
Curators Marie-Christin Lender and Christopher Weickenmeier write, " Worlding It Otherwise or Else explores how artistic work works. Beyond the material conditions of production, artists may invent their own set of conditions and relations through which their work is rendered working. And those circumstances are no less real, significant, or material for that matter.
Taking this supposed paradox as a starting point, the group exhibition assembles four artists that each in their own way define laws, narratives, and forces – effectively putting worlds into practice, making things visible that are there and that are not.
.
Between Swimming and Dryland became the starting point for producing the solo exhibition, under the same title, at Kunstverein Reutlingen, which focused on the questions of bodily limitations, boundaries and violations.

small-49_revplansan-aus-abnahme-ubergabe_opt
worlding_barenzwinger_0_allg
szaflarski_between-swimming-and-dryland_2019_credit_marlene-burz_2
szaflarski_between-swimming-and-dryland_2019_credit_marlene-burz_3
szaflarski_between-swimming-and-dryland_2019_credit_marlene-burz_4
20190722_kunstvereinreutlingen_aszaflarski-001
20190722_kunstvereinreutlingen_aszaflarski-009
20190722_kunstvereinreutlingen_aszaflarski-010
20190722_kunstvereinreutlingen_aszaflarski-011
20190722_kunstvereinreutlingen_aszaflarski-012
20190722_kunstvereinreutlingen_aszaflarski-018