Henryk Gajewski (born 1948) is an artist, a photographer, a film director, a theoretician, and a cultural activist. In the years 1972-1978 he ran the Galeria Remont and subsequently, until 1982, the Post Remont gallery, an experimental arts and education centre open to new trends in culture. Gajewski organised the international festival of performance art, the International Artists’ Meeting (I AM) in 1978, and was one of the main promoters of punk music in Polish People's Republic. Soon after the introduction of martial law, he emigrated to the Netherlands where he lives today.
Gajewski was born in Białystok. As a student of Faculty of Electronics at the Warsaw University of Technology he founded Galeria Remont in the “Riviera” Student Dormitory, which he managed with Andrzej Jórczak and Krzysztof Wojciechowski until 1977. Initially Gajweski conformed with conceptualism, dominant in contemporary art at that time, however he would gradually turn towards sociocultural contexts and conditions of artistic activities. Already in his first exhibition at Remont Gajewski titled Ona (Her) in 1972 he confronted two types of images of women: from the press and popular newspapers and those made by kindergarten and primary school-age children. Two years later Gajewski created Book for Elise (Książka dla Elizy) for his daughter. The work featured blank spaces, which were to be filled in the subsequent years with photographs taken at various locations and in different situations as his daughter grew up. The book itself was meant to circulate among the artists, Gajewski’s friends, in fashion similar to mail art.
Gajewski's fascination with child's imagination manifested itself most significantly in Other Child Book (Inna książka dla dziecka) a project carried out between 1977 and 1981 with participation of 250 artists from 29 countries (i.a. Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, and Henryk Stażewski). The books that had been sent in were presented in 1979 at the Palace of Culture and Science and in the main hall of Warsaw University of Technology. The aim of the initiative was to create books for children that would instil sensitivity and creativity, thus substituting textbooks, which teach submission and routine. Gajweski organised actions and workshops with children dedicating great attention as to how stimulating creativity can impact and the social reality.
Educational work and activities were just one of many means that Gajewski used in an attempt to escape the ivory tower of modernist art. Others included playing with audience, as in case of the fictitious meeting with Andy Warhol in 1974. Gajewski designed a poster with the image of the creator of pop art, his name, date, and a note: “exhibition opening, meeting”. Also, as a part of the hoax, even a luxury apartment at one of high-profile Warsaw hotels was to be rented for Warhol. Once the audience gathered in large numbers at Galeria Remont at the time indicated on the posters, it turned out the American artist did not arrive. The point of this action was indeed a “meeting” however not with Andy Warhol, but rather with the persons arrived at the venue.
The interpersonal, existential sense of a meeting was highlighted once more in 1978 during the International Artists’ Meeting, abbreviated as “I AM” or “I am”. It was the first review of performance art of such extent in Central and Eastern Europe. It was this event that contributed to the establishment of performance art as an art category as such. Also, thanks to the concert of The Raincoats I AM symbolically introduced punk to Poland, i.e. a first official punk performance, that within a year and half triggered a proliferation of Polish bands, and made Remont a permanent venue for punk events.
Gajewski worked closely with Jan Świdziński and shared his concept of contextual art — an art consisting primarily of communication between persons in various situations and negotiating meanings between different contexts. The communication aspect of art seems to be crucial for Gajewski, which partially explains his interest in punk. Interpersonal art that relied on communication had to transcend institutional frameworks and be in touch with the social transformations’ dynamics. Gajweski perceived punk, with all its vividness, expression, and provocativeness, as an extremely significant manifestation of social life, a popular culture phenomenon, which could not be disregarded. Having avid interest in futurology, he tried to combine artistic praxis with sociological forecasts, which led him to the formulation of the concept of “pre-facts”, i.e.events that cause the occurrences of particular facts in the future. The phenomenon of punk in the late 1970s can be interpreted as a “pre-fact” of the nearing social unrest.
From 1978 to 1981 Remont was probably the most important spot on punk community’s map of Warsaw. It hosted concerts and Sound Clubs (rock, world, reggae, and ska music events), as well as meetings of fans and artists. Gajewski photographed the colourful punk community, shot films with musicians, e.g. Tilt Back in 1980 and Passenger in 1984, published a cassette tape with the recordings of performances during the 1st Polish New Wave Festival in Kołobrzeg in 1980, and finally, published the PUNK, Post, and Post Remont leaflets and fanzines.
Meanwhile, in 1978, Galleria Remont closed down and was replaced by Post Remont, a centre focused on education and cultural activism, open to new trends, styles, and genres, breaking with a typical profile of a gallery. Punky, experimental Post Remont was an act of defiance both aimed at the world of conceptual art, visibly exhausted in the late 1970s, and at the trivial and idle popular culture offered by entertainment industry. Post Remont hosted presentations of artists’ books, mail art, video art, happenings and performance art. Its activities were interrupted by the introduction of the martial law in December 1981.
Shortly afterwards, at the beginning of the following year Gajewski left for Amsterdam, where he continued his artistic activities. He presented his complicated life story in Identity, a 1985 film addressing the issues of origins, religion, language, and fatherland from the perspective of a Polish immigrant in Amsterdam. “I was born in Bialystok, Poland, the home-town of Ludwik Zamenhof, the creator of the Esperanto language. (Esperanto was designed as an international language.) Since 1982, I have lived in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Here I communicate with people in English. My children, Eliza and Pierre, write to me in French and I answer them by recording my voice on an audio cassette (I cannot write in French). I was taught Russian for 11 years, as was every educated Polish citizen, but I cannot identify myself with that language. Slowly but surely I am forgetting my mother tongue and, at the same time, my English is too poor for me to adequately express myself. Say hello to Ludwig Wittgenstein, but tell him that besides language there is also FEELING.”
Gajewski continues his career as an artist and a filmmaker. His works were presented at i.a Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Le Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, MACBA in Barcelona, Centraal Museum in Utrecht, and Verzetsmuseum in Amsterdam. Apart from his artistic pursuits, Gajewski runs a tango dance school.
His activities in the 1970s and early 1980s were met with unappreciative and distrustful reactions of the authorities of Polish People's Republic. Gajewski’s wide contacts abroad raised suspicions, while artistic provocations and promotion of punk bands caused distrust. The world of art also displayed disapproval, repulsed with Gajewski’s legitimisation of loud-mouthed punk bands.
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Umístění:
- Amsterdam, Netherlands
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Umístění:
- Kraków, Poland
Galántai, György is an artist, researcher, cofounder of Artpool, art director of the Artpool Art Research Center and curator of Artpool’s website. From 1963 to 1967, he studied painting at the College of Fine Arts in Budapest. From 1970 to 1973, he was the initiator and organizer of semi-legal exhibitions, actions, and happenings in an unused chapel in Balatonboglár, which he had rented from the Catholic Church; his Chapel Studio was finally closed down by the police. Subsequently, Galántai’s artistic activities were restricted and tightly monitored.
In 1970, Galántai abandoned painting and began to experiment, primarily with graphic art, visual poetry, sound poetry, and performance and mail art. In 1975, he created his first metal sculptures. He has also made prints, paintings, kinetic and sound sculptures, actions, and performances. He is the author of several multimedia installations and communication projects.
His view of art bears close affinities with the spirit of Fluxus, defining the task of art as inventing conceptual objects, creative situations, and spiritual spaces. In spite of this, the idea behind the Artpool project is to create an active archive: the way in which it operates also generates the material to be archived. As an artist, Galántai was already involved in the mail art network when Artpool was founded, so the network offered a natural framework for this kind of operation and provided sources for growth. Artpool issued calls, organized events, released publications, and extensively documented the events of the local neo-avant-garde scene. The active archive concept can be seen as an open artwork in itself or an activist kind of art practice.
During the socialist era in Hungary, Galántai organized underground exhibitions, so he was considered a “dangerous element” by the authorities because he allegedly spread western propaganda. He was monitored by the III/III department of the State Security Services, who opened a dossier called “Festő” [Painter], which focused solely on his activity. In 1998, he made public the content of the dossier on the internet: http://www.galantai.hu/festo/default.html.
Galántai, György received a fellowship from the DAAD in 1988/89 and was guest artist at Arizona State University in 1990.
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Umístění:
- Budapest, Hungary
Ștefan Gane (b. 1924, Bucharest, d. 1988, Paris) was a Romanian architect who asserted himself in the Romanian exile in France from 1985 when he set up in Paris the International Association for the Protection of Monuments and Historic Sites in Romania. This association was established in order to present to political decision makers and international public opinion the project of the communist regime in Romania for the destruction of Romania’s architectural and urban heritage. The actions taken by this association focused on dissemination of information on the demolition of the city centre of Bucharest, as part of the project devised by the authorities of the totalitarian regime in order to reconstruct it according to the communist architectural vision. Ștefan Gane was joined by a series of personalities of the Romanian exile community who, together with him, wrote letters and memoirs to Western officials (for example, to the President of France, François Mitterrand), to international organisations such as UNESCO, and to the editorial offices of foreign publications. They also organised protests in the streets of Paris, the goal of which was to inform and mobilise public opinion in the West to such an extent as to trigger an external intervention to hamper the destruction project planned by the Ceaușescu regime.
Prior to his emigration to France, Ștefan Gane worked as an architect in his hometown. In Bucharest, he started to express his dissatisfaction with the communist regime in 1977 after the earthquake, which served as a pretext for the destruction or mutilation of many historic monuments. His dissatisfaction was related to the Bucharest systematisation programme of the Ceaușescu regime. Against this background, Ștefan Gane started to pursue a cultural opposition activity directed against the arbitrary policy of the Ceaușescu regime aimed at annihilating an essential part of the national past. In this connection, between 1977 and 1985, when he emigrated to France, he secretly photographed a series of historic monuments that were destroyed or mutilated by the Communist authorities. His purpose was to preserve the memory of some national heritage monuments and gather testimonies for future generations about the Ceaușescu regime's policy of transforming the urban landscape and destroying what did not fit the communist vision of national heritage. After settling in Paris, he publicly and openly expressed his views on the demolition project devised by the Ceaușescu regime. He died of cancer in Paris in 1988, and was buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, where a number of prominent personalities are buried.
His activity, however, was continued by a former colleague from the Faculty of Architecture in Bucharest, Sanda Budiș, who joined his actions from 1985 to 1988. On 10 May 1988, she founded the Association for the Protection of Villages, Monuments, and Historic Sites in Romania based in Switzerland. Among other activities, this association dealt with the establishment of partnerships between Swiss and Romanian villages, which were organised by Opération Villages Roumains (OVR). OVR was founded in December 1988, in Belgium, with the purpose of adopting and saving all 13,123 Romanian villages, which, according to Ceaușescu's announcement, should have disappeared from the map. The OVR action managed to take on a considerable scale in just a few months, with the creation of committees of this association in France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Norway, and Denmark. Basically, OVR followed an already existing model in postwar Western Europe, aiming at creating partnerships between localities with a similar economic and geographical profile in order to create local development opportunities through joint efforts as well as transnational solidarities. Although there had been partnerships with localities in Eastern Europe, OVR was without a correspondent in the Communist bloc, considering the magnitude and speed of its evolution.
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Umístění:
- Paris, France
Hristo Ganev (1924 - ) adopted the communist views at young age and became a member of the Labour Youth Union (LYU). During World War II he participated in the communist resistance movement and was the youngest partisan of the Chavdar Brigade. After the establishment of the new authorities, Hristo Ganev was among the young people who were sent to the Soviet Union for training in the field of cinema. In 1954 H. Ganev graduated in film dramaturgy from the All-Russian State University of Cinematography in Moscow. His graduation work as a script-writer was the biographical film about the life of Nikola Vaptsarov "Song of Man" (1954) (director Borislav Sharaliev). The movie was assigned, one of the first of the nationalized in 1948 cinematography. The aim was to create an epic and monumental idea about the poet – worker and communist. The film was screened though there were also negative reviews on the part of the censorial bodies: although the film was mainly made up to the standard of the aesthetics of the time, the script-writer and the director tried to present "the poet in more intimate and human light" (Станимирова 2012: 63).
The second half of the 1950s and the 1960s were a time when bright talents in every field of the culture were blooming; at the same time, the pressure of the authorities on the intellectuals was increasing. The movie "Life Flows Quietly By..." (1957) directed by Hristo Ganev's wife, Binka Zhelyazkova, was banned by a ministerial decree. The long story of the discussions of Hristo Ganev's script (initially called "Partisans" but later renamed "Life Flows Quietly By...") shows the mechanisms and institutions of censorship in socialist Bulgaria. The following joint films of the director Binka Zhelyazkova and the script-writer Hristo Ganev also posed inconvenient questions to the authorities about the moral crisis, the exchange of communist ideals for high party positions and everyday life comfort and criticized the search for enemy amidst your own ranks, the conformism, and the compromise.
In 1971, Hristo Ganev and the writers Blagoy Dimitrov, Valeri Petrov, Marko Ganchev and Gocho Gochev refused to uphold a telegram written by the Union of the Bulgarian Writers (UBW) stigmatizing the Nobel Committee for awarding the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Because of their clear stand, the four members of the Bulgarian Communist Party were expelled from the party and the non-party Blagoy Dimitrov was expelled from the Writers' Union. They were all banned for five years from working; that was a period during which Hristo Ganev earned his living by shooting advertising productions for the television. Yet Hristo Ganev remained true to his ideals; his joint films with Binka Zhelyazkova ("Life Flows Quietly By...", "We Were Young", "The Swimming Pool", "The Big Night Bathe", "On the Roofs at Night") are steeped in faith in the idea to which they had devoted their youth and in sorrow for the idea having become mercenary. In their movies, the two artists clashed views and moral values and exposed the moral degradation of the system and the use of power for personal benefit. Their films are distinguished for vanguard directorial decisions as well as for dramaturgical construction with strong dramatic characters, bright and memorable situations, impressing details.
Hristo Ganev has rendered great services to the development of the animation cinema as an ideological and graphic paradigm. In his animation scripts, Ganev treated the "theme of the moral crisis and the maze in the time of the socialist imperative of the "active positive character". Using the symbolic language of the conditional, non-linear, fragmentary and suggestive building of the plot, absolutely free of ideological matrices he was able to express his view on the meaning of life, on the decline and betrayal against the ideals." (Матеева 2014) The expressive vision was mainly achieved with the help of the director Anri Kulev.
During the entire period of state socialism, Hristo Ganev was notable for his work as well as for his civil stand in defence of the freedom of speech and art; he publicly supported banned works from various spheres of the culture; he declared against the repressive measures against the intellectuals by directly accusing the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party.
After the political changes, Hristo Ganev continued to treat in his animation scripts themes that interpreted existential problems of the modern man: freedom and compromise; the damages caused by the consumption force, egoism and complacency eroding the value system; love and loneliness. Even today, Hristo Ganev's films find public response and win great recognition.
After the political changes, Hristo Ganev received a series of (state) awards (Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Bulgarian Cinema and Culture of the Ministry of Culture, 2007; Stara Planina Order, 2010; honorary diploma and the St. Paisii Hilendarski Annual State Award, 2011; Ivan Vazov Medal of the Union of the Bulgarian Writers, 2014). One could not forget Hristo Ganev's speech when receiving the Paisii Hilendarski Award: "My long and variegated life during monarchy, socialism and democracy taught me to meet punishments and awards with slightly skeptical distance. I know that often they were both undeserved." (by Дончева 2014: 37)
Filmography
- Man's Song (1954), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Borislav Sharaliev
- Two Victories (1956), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Borislav Sharaliev, Veselin Hanchev
- Life Flows Quietly By.../ Partizans (1957), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Binka Zhelyazkova
- We Were Young (1961), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Binka Zhelyazkova
- Feast of Hope (1963) Documentary, directed by Hristo Ganev
- Devil in the Church (1969) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Ivan Veselinov
- The Little Man (1976) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, director Gencho Simeonov
- Hypothesis (1976) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, director Gencho Simeonov
- The Swimming Pool (1977), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Binka Zhelyazkova
- The Big Night Bathe (1980), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Binka Zhelyazkova
- Bagpipes (Gayda) (1982) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev and Nikolay Todorov
- Safari (1984) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev
- The Merry Rascal (1987) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev
- Beggarly Trio (1988) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev
- On the Roofs at Night (1988), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Binka Zhelyazkova
- The Tender Monster (1994) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev
- The Tenth Circle (1998) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anna Haralaptieva
- The Slim Man (2001) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev
- Poet and Pegasus (2003) Animation, Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev
- The Rag (2007) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev
- Love With Rain (2015) Cartoon, Hristo Ganev scriptwriter, directors: Asya Kovanova, Andrey Kulev-
Umístění:
- Sofia, Bulgaria