Hello Siri and welcome to Not Random Art: to start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your background? Are there any experiences that has influence the way you currently relate yourself to dance? And in particular, does your cultural substratum inform your aesthetics ?
. Hello, and thank you for wanting me in the magazine. When I was young, I didn’t focus much on schoolwork and prioritized rhythmic gymnastics, which I practised after school. Then, when I started at secondary school, I still wasn’t interested in studying. After a while, I quit the gymnastics and started dancing. I was tired of grades in school and of gymnastics teacher specifying everything. I found joy in dancing. I moved freely, and I got to think creatively. Then I decided to apply to the only high school with dance majors in Tromsø, and I was accepted. There I learned different dance techniques, dance history and choreographic means. This, in turn, became a springboard to choose dance in higher education. Here I unfortunately was not accepted, so I took a one-year program at Trøndertun instead. Whilst there, I dance freely with my choreographic tools, and wanted to explore some uncomfortable movements and challenge the body and the techniques. But it did not feel as ground-breaking as I had hoped. In retrospect, when I see films of it though, it does look nice on stage.After the one year, I got accepted into the school of new dance, Oslo (now it's called University College of Dance Art med BA in Dance Art and Choreographic). This school challenged me on every level and taught me what dance and movement can be. Bigger questions appeared behind my motivation to move, and I began to explore my interests and my own movement language. I challenged myself. I remember particularly well one of the tasks we got. Create an opposing solo. Opposite of what you would have done. So I lay on the floor and rolled for 20min. in SLOW-motion. It will not be redisplayed, but it made me think of what I did and did not do, and it has made me become aware of the importance of every choice I make.Today I study contemporary art in Tromsø. Here I explore movement in media such as photography and video.
Your approach coherently encapsulates several viewpoints to reveal an incessant search of an organic investigation about the expressive potential of gesture: the results convey together a coherent and consistent sense of harmony and unity. While walking our readers through your process , we would like to ask ask you how did you develope your style and how do you conceive your works?
The ideas usually develop form one image or a small sequence in my head, and most likely right before I go to sleep. These small images spin around in my head, and then mixes together with what I've experienced and my associations. It then gets processed during my sleep. If I remember the idea the day after, I write it down. Natural selection I call it. I get triggered by new experiences, tastes, gestures, new clothing, new furniture etc. Since dance is a part of my language, an extension of my verbal language, if you will, everything I experience can be taken into my creative process. The process is always with me and I try to have an internal dialogue, or meta-dialogue, with myself to see where I am in the process. Sometimes I work so intuitive though, that when I look at the final result, I find myself in a situation where I have to look at the process as if part of an audience. The process has been, somewhat, forgotten and foreign. To get a bit more specific, I work a lot with space and the use of space, whether it be photography, video installation or dance. This is an aesthetic that helps form and settle the piece.
By definition dances rhythm and movement, gesture and continuity. You create time-based works that conveying a moment of time, from past to present, induces us to rethink the concept of time in such a static way: this seems to remove any historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in a more atemporal form. How do you conceive the rhythm of your works?
By working with a non-linear narrative. I never start with the beginning of the choreography first. On the contrary. A bit like in literature, most writers know the end of the book, whilst the content before is open to change. And if it is a performance or an installation it can challenge the time in the body (the dancer, the room and the time in itself). I believe that the best part about dancing is that it's constantly changing. The body as a tool is affected by time. Take this example: I make a choreography with high tempo shift, high jumps and hard landings on the floor, and then I take the same choreography up again when I am 65 years old. Needless to say, it would be quite interesting. I can't wait to see Siri as 65 and still dancing!
How do you see the relationship between public sphere and the role of art in public space? In particular, how much do you consider the immersive nature of the viewing experience?
I was classically trained in music from the age of five. Upon receiving my diploma in piano performance at the age of twelve, I have studied music theory and sonology. Because of my past, techniques in my sound works are critically important when creating the form of my works. In particular, I engage in intense repetition of my motifs in my sound based works, in which a slightest change in the repetition becomes a symbolic shift in the climate of the soundscape, and silence becomes the accent of the music.
How do you see the relationship between emotional and intellectual perception of your work? In particular, how much do you consider the immersive nature of the viewing experience?
My works often explore between the improvisational and the theoretical boundaries, recurrently overlapping with each other, in a given time frame. Sound art and music are time-based art. Without a written statement of the concept, the audience can only subjectively engage in the experience during the time frame that the artist prepared.
Multidisciplinarity seems to be a crucial aspect of your approach and it`s remarkable the way you are capable of creating such effective symbiosis between elements from different techniques, manipulating language and recontextualizing images and concepts. While crossing the borders of different disciplines and materials is the only way to acheive some results, to express some concepts?
If you look closely at any work of art with an open mind, any form of art can be defined as a multi-disciplinary work. I first noticed this when I was working part-time in the backstage of a concert hall, when I heard an orchestra perform a famous tune. While I knew how the tune sounded, I noticed that the melody line was inaudible from the position I was at. From this experience, I came to a conclusion that a musical work is not merely instruments executing the notes notated on the score, but a spatiotemporal art with infinite possibilities and potentials yet to be pioneered. My conclusion led to the production of my multi-disciplinary spatiotemporal work –shikaku– in 2014, utilizing an orchestra, electronics, choreography, and video techniques.
Before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?
Yes, audience reception is a crucial part of how I mold my works. This, however, does not mean that the acknowledgement by the audience is necessary. In my chamber orchestra work “A Narcissist’s Self-Portrait” (2015), the instrumentalists inflame seeds of laughter into the audience by frantically laughing on stage. The laughter is then naturally passed onto the audience, which interactively produces the situation funnier for everyone, eventually leading to a bigger laughter of the instrumentalists on stage.
hank you for your interest in my work, I think my artistic practice is closely related to the continually evolving post-digital culture, its evolving hybridity, forms and articulations. In my work, I question the cultural condition after digital technology revolutions. I tend to involve the experiential side of digitally created art to a conceptual level. For me, the conceptual logic is a part as important as the experiential side of an artwork. If every artwork produces some kind of aesthetic experience, only a part of them integrated a conceptual signification. That’s why I find fascinating the work of contemporary artists such as Philippe Parreno and Carsten Höller. They (among others) are able to retreat behind the idea of restoring experiential and intersubjective capacities of art and by the same time encouraging reflection. I’m also inspired by the work of artists from 1960/70s like (among others) Otto Piene, Gianni Colombo or Lucio Fontana. I believe you can find in my work the influence of Fontana’s idea to consider the flat surface as a three-dimensional work that records the passage of time and its interaction with light. Such a situated dimension of experience I’ve represented in my work BEHIND THE SCREEN through the line-cut of light that suggests the moment of suspended interaction but also the existence of another dimension and possibilities realities.
Would you like to tell us something about your artistical as well as life background?
I am an interdisciplinary artist born in Poland and I live and work in Paris. In the past years I was working as an architect, designer and researcher. I’ve studied architecture, art and new media design and I hold a PhD in Critical Theory of Architecture from University Paris-Est and a master degree in New Medias Art & Design from Ensci in Paris. I’m also the author of scientific publications that explore the multifaceted impact of digital technologies on the disciplines of art, design and architecture. I think that this academic experience helped me to understand better and to define myself through an artistic practice. I started to show my work(s) a few years ago and since then I‘ve exposed at LACADA Center For Digital Art Los Angeles, Artifact Exhibition at International Biennial of Design Saint-Étienne, Digital Image Exhibition at Athens Digital Arts Festival ADAF 2016 and International Exhibition on Conceptual Art Concept at the CICA Museum Gimpo-si, South Korea.
What in your opinion defines a work of art? And moreover, what could be the features that mark the contemporariness of an artwork?
ancultural substratum/identity form your aesthetics?periment using multiple video projectors, and my work has become an active element onstage, sometimes interacting with the performers. Every project has been useful in some way for exploring and refining my ideas. Now in my capacity as film director, I'm able to call upon my experiences gained from working as a cross disciplinary artist.
Your artworks are revolving around the problem of social identity and cultural affiliations. Is there any particular way you would describe your identity as an artist but also as a human being in dynamically changing, unstable times? In particular, does your cultural substratum/identity form your aesthetics?
I belong to a minority group in society and that identity is always a part of me and my work. I don’t believe my artworks are changing due to unstable times but that I'm working my way through a theme and a method over time. The content of my work is becoming more and more personal and I think that is because I dare to be more honest with myself. What I find interesting to work with is in my immediate presence. When I collaborate with stageartists, we often focus on a current political theme. In these collaborations I work more as an art activist and have a broader openess for the aesthetics. My work is then more experimental with research on different ways to develop live presentations in the space.
Could you identify a specific artwork that has influenced your artistic practice or has impacted the way you think about race
and ethnic identity in visual culture?
“Revolted by the Thought of Known Places… Sweeney Astray” by Joan Jonas was one of the first performance installations that really made a huge impact on me. I was living in Paris during this time, in the early 90s, with a lot of influences from different cultures. It became the starting point of my own work. Joan Jonas practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the authority of objects and gestures. Jonas continues to find new layers of meanings in themes and questions of gender and identity that have fueled her art for over thirty years. She is a great inspiration still today.
It is impossible to avoid the topic of body consciousness, embodied emotions and the image of body and personal identity that we see in your practice. What is the function of the identity appearing in your artworks – is it a canvas used to present your ideas or rather the subject of the art? What inspired you to use this as a theme in your practice?
I have been developing my visual imagery since I began studying art and film - from conceptual thinking, composition, using light and colour in different ways, through all the different techniques I've utilised over the years in my work and in my collaborations with stage artists such as dancers, musicians and actors. My approach is always developing through exploring these things. Visual imagery in essence is your way of experiencing what you see and transforming it. This is my world that I want to share and express through my art. The body consciousness, embodied emotions and the image of body and personal identity is part of this visual imagery, the emotional essence in my practice. Always present and always developing in different themes and projects.
Marina Abramovic stated: You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of
which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, 'I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.'Can you relate anyhow to these words?
de-identify myself, by losing my roots, my culture, I would be very happy. Unfortunately the human being does'nt choose the place where he is born. He grows up in a society that automatically identifies, through education, culture, family... More than ever I think it's more important to go on a way of self-knowledge with the aim to meet “the other”.. This other without which we can not exist. It's the same for the artist. It is more important for me to be focused on my practice than to try to define it according to esthetic criteria of identification. It's probably the reason i like to remember the painter Matisse who said or wrote that an artist must never be prisoner of himself, prisoner of a style, prisoner of a reputation.
Would you like to tell us something about your background? Could you talk a little about experiences that has influence the way you currently relate yourself to your artworks?
All my way is influenced by encounterings.
It began by the meeting with my professor of literature at school. More than giving French or Literature classes, she brought us to discover texts, movies, plays, visual artworks and to think about on what we saw or read.. Thanks to her that I met Pierre Vincke, a theatredirector who was worjink in the tradition of Grotowski ... Both of them have led me to go to theater school. In this school I had meetings. Meetings with artists but also and especially human beings that made me discover. I always need o discover rather than to master a practice. It's probably the reason my encounter with Monica Klingler and Boris Nieslony was decisive for me and led me on the path of Performance Art which is a form still difficult to define. Each performance artist has a different definition of what it is...
Could you identify a specific artwork that has influenced your artistic practice or has impacted the way you think about race and ethnic identity in visual culture?
No I don't have a specific artwork that has influenced my artistic practise but many.
I'm influenced by some philsophers as well as poets or musicians or dancers or visual artists but also by some places or landscapes or atmospheres ... For some years, I was used for example to go to India where I was used to follow some traditionnal muscians or to learn bharatanatyam and practice vipassana meditation... Of course this experience has impacted my art work.... This brought me to think and work differently... My experience in India brought me to discover traditionnal strong art and paradoxally to the way of Performance Art. But there I see one common point: to make no separation between art and life and to be here and now, without projection on the future.
It's difficult for me to speak about race and ethnic identity. But I can say that today we miss more and more this notion of “to be here and now” which is more present in some cultures ... By practising Performance Art, it's my way to be connected to this way of thinking. And even in this field actually it's more and more difficult. The society and the art world brings us more and more to plan in advance, to define our work, more than to do. Just to do. To do what we deeply need.
And of course, my encountering with Black Market International and later the notion of Open Source or Open session via PAErsche have also a big impact on my work. When we go on that, each of us perform by sharing time and space but without trying to convince each other on some common way. This is for me a wonderfull way how we can meet each other, regardless of our origin, our race or our “identity”...
Many of your works carry an autobiographical message. Since you transform your experiences into your artwork, we are curious, what is the role of memory in your artistic productions? We are particularly interested if you try to achieve a faithful translation of your previous experiences or if you rather use memory as starting point to create.
My memory is clearly a starting point to create. I don't have any autobiographical message. I use my personnal experience ( what I feel , what I see, what I learn, what I ear...) to work. It's a motor or a material. I'm not able to paint, so I can't do something with red or white or yellow or black colors. All I have is life, a body alive. And I need to do something with that...
My sensation about life sometimes is too intense then I need to transform this intensity in some action. Some artistic action... If people can take something from this action this is great... but I don't want to give them “a specific message” or to control the translation of my experience.