Christian Jankowski: Heavy Weight History

...after three days enjoying Christian Jankowski's artworks, a catalogue on the Heavy Weight History and many others!

Institute of Contemporary Arts

Artists' Film Biennial 2014: Christian Jankowski Programme 1 : Reframed

This first part of a three-part retrospective programme offers a glimpse at Jankowski’s films, presenting a selection of work charting a period of over years twenty years.

Christian Jankowski (born 1968, Göttingen, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibition include Heavy Weight History, CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2013); The Eye of Dubai, The Pavilion Downtown Dubai, Dubai, UAE (2013) and Casting Jesus, MACRO (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma), Rome. He has participated in numerous group shows including Tears and Politics: Works by Phil Collins and Christian Jankowski, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2014);Christian Jankowski and Guga Ferraz, Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros, Mexico (2012); What Happened to God?, Halle 14, Leipzig (2012) and The Beauty and the Distance, 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010).

This three-part retrospective programme offers a generous glimpse at Jankowski’s films, presenting a selection of work charting a period of over years twenty years from 1992 to the present. Each programme is structured around a theme, defining a distinct strand of his practice.

The first programme, Reframed, draws on the absurdity that often arises when contexts are juxtaposed or realigned. Puppet Conference, 2003, sees a line-up of familiar puppets, synonymous with childhood pursuits, engaged in a very different dialogue. Lycan Theorized, 2009, takes a cinematic tone to explore Lacanian theory through the lens of the horror genre.

Programme 1: Reframed

• Discourse News, 2012, SD video, colour, sound, 5 min 45 sec
• Ebbe in Freedom, 1992, SD video, colour, sound, 8 min 58 sec
• Lycan Theorized, 2006, 35mm transferred to SD video, colour, sound, 23 min
• Puppet Conference, 2003, SD video, colour, sound, 25 min
• Rosa, 2001, SD video, colour, sound, 18 min 54 sec

Total duration: 82 min

Artists' Film Biennial 2014: Christian Jankowski Programme 2 : Learning the Absurd

This second part of a three-part retrospective programme offers a glimpse at Jankowski’s films, presenting a selection of work charting a period of over years twenty years.

Christian Jankowski (born 1968, Göttingen, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibition include Heavy Weight History, CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2013); The Eye of Dubai, The Pavilion Downtown Dubai, Dubai, UAE (2013) and Casting Jesus, MACRO (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma), Rome. He has participated in numerous group shows including Tears and Politics: Works by Phil Collins and Christian Jankowski, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2014);Christian Jankowski and Guga Ferraz, Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros, Mexico (2012); What Happened to God?, Halle 14, Leipzig (2012) and The Beauty and the Distance, 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010).

This three-part retrospective programme offers a generous glimpse at Jankowski’s films, presenting a selection of work charting a period of over years twenty years from 1992 to the present. Each programme is structured around a theme, defining a distinct strand of his practice.

This second programme, Learning the Absurd, draws together a diverse selection of works that connect childhood with adult pursuits and vice versa. The humorous The Matrix Effect, 2000, features a cast of children, each playing the role of an artist from the late 20th Century. In contrast, Rooftop, 2007 features an adult cast who give advice on the most effective approaches to hula hooping.

Programme 2: Learning the Absurd

• Cleaning Up the Studio, 2010, HD video, colour, sound, 9 min 33 sec
• When I Was Cuisillo, 2009, SD video, colour, sound, 2 min 57 sec
• Rooftop Routine, 2007, SD video, colour, sound, 4 min 30 sec
• Let’s Get Physical/ Digital, 1997, SD video, colour, sound, 37 min 32 sec
• The Finest Art on Water, 2011, HD video, colour, sound, 10 min
• The Matrix Effect, 2000, SD video, colour, sound, 24 min 54 sec

Total duration: 90 min

Artists' Film Biennial 2014: Christian Jankowski Programme 2 : Believe Me + Q&A

This last part of a three-part retrospective programme offers a glimpse at Jankowski’s films, presenting a selection of work charting a period of over twenty years.

Christian Jankowski (born 1968, Göttingen, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibition include Heavy Weight History, CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2013); The Eye of Dubai, The Pavilion Downtown Dubai, Dubai, UAE (2013) and Casting Jesus, MACRO (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma), Rome. He has participated in numerous group shows including Tears and Politics: Works by Phil Collins and Christian Jankowski, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2014);Christian Jankowski and Guga Ferraz, Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros, Mexico (2012); What Happened to God?, Halle 14, Leipzig (2012) and The Beauty and the Distance, 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010).

This three-part retrospective programme offers a generous glimpse at Jankowski’s films, presenting a selection of work charting a period of over years twenty years from 1992 to the present. Each programme is structured around a theme, defining a distinct strand of his practice.

The final programme, Believe Me, takes a focused look at belief structures, in particular those of the art world. Jankowski’s Telemistica, 1999, sees a host of TV psychics advise the artist on his participation in the 2009 Venice Biennale. The recent Heavy Weight History, 2013, takes the form of a television sports report. A group of Eastern European weight lifters take up the challenge of attempting to lift monuments symbolic of the region's past.

The screening is followed by a Q&A with artist Christian Jankowski and ICA Associate Curator of Artists’ Film and Moving Image Steven Cairns.

Programme 3: Believe Me

16-mm Mystery, 2004, 35mm transferred to DVD, colour, sound, 5 min

The Hunt, 1992, SD video, colour, sound, 1 min 11 sec

Telemistica, 1999, SD video, colour, sound, 22 min 8 sec

The Holy Artwork, 2001, SD video, colour, sound 2001, 15 min 52 sec

No One Better Than You, 2004, SD video, colour, sound, 3 min 1sec

Heavy Weight History, 2013, HD video, colour, sound, 25 min 46 sec

Der Malteser Blick, 2014, HD video, colour, sound, 1 min 49 sec

Total duration: 76 min + 30 min Q&A

Curated by Steven Cairns, ICA Associate Curator of Artists’ Film and Moving Image.

Since the early 1990s, German artist Christian Jankowski has tested the boundaries between high art and mass-culture. Often co-opting the space of commercial television and cinema, he continuously subverts and pokes fun at the role of mass culture in the everyday, paralleling the structure of the art world with that of organised religion or the cult of the celebrity.

Christian Jankowski (b. 1968, Göttingen, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include “Heavy Weight History”, Lisson Gallery, London (2014); “Heavy Weight History”, CCA Tel Aviv (2014) and Wasser, Käse, Feuer. Christian Jankowski. “25 Editionen und ein anonymes Original” Helga Maria Klosterfelde Edition, Berlin (2014). He has participated in numerous group shows including “Tears and Politics: Works by Phil Collins and Christian Jankowski”, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2014); “Room Service”, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2014); “Real Emotions: Thinking in Film”, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2014) and “Things we discover alone (Independent Learning)”, Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig (2014).

Please note that all films are 18+ unless otherwise stated.

Aesthetics of the Non-visible

Image by Edson Chagas, Found Not Taken, 2014. Courtesy the artist and A Palazzo Gallery, Brescia, Italy

After seeing on the internet the Russian Ark (2002), a film by Akexander Sokurov, in where "a 19th century French aristocrat, notorious for his scathing memoirs about life in Russia, travels through the Russian State Hermitage Museum and encounters historical figures from the last 200+ years", the first thought that came into my mind was the idea of Noah's Ark being a big, transitional USB pen packed with data; or, an aesthetic white cube, in where data is storage and displayed for buyers, just like the data storage centres are immaculate spaces free of that amazing external and timeless thing that dust is. The second significant idea derived is towards works by such artists as, Andreas Schmidt, who creates books that function as physical archives for non-physical images; Dina Kelbermann, who display images contaminated by the non-visible, through associations that are mediated by the archive in itself; or, Mishka Henner' confrontation and creation of new subjectivities. All playing with photography and the act of not take photographs, as well as, instead of a "find the differences" between two 'equal' images, we have to find what relates and connects together in what seems to be different images, i.e., find what is 'equal'. Establishing an alternate archive and interfere in how we set our gaze.
Following the ICA' Artists' Film Biennial 2014 Symposium on Aesthetics of the Non-visible...

[Lunch for £11 at the ICA bar]

Christian Jankowski: Heavy Weight History

Christian Jankowski
Heavy Weight History
Lisson Gallery

PRESS RELEASE:

Last year the German artist Christian Jankowski travelled to Poland to produce Heavy Weight History, which consists of an installation, a 25-minute film and a series of photographs. Jankowski invited a group of burly weightlifters to try and pick up a number of massive public sculptures in the Polish capital of Warsaw, including more than one Communist-era memorial, a statue of Ronald Reagan and the figure of Syrenka the Mermaid, a famous, often vandalised symbol of the city, first erected in 1859. Wearing their national colours, the Polish champion powerlifters and bench-pressers struggle and strain to elevate these hefty bronze and brick monuments, metaphorically attempting to lift the very burden of history on to their shoulders.

Simultaneously disturbing and stimulating debates surrounding the still-raw history of Polish occupation by the Nazis, as well as the country’s protracted period of Soviet rule after WWII, Jankowski’s film conversely posits a light-hearted and socially-inclusive aspect to his controversial undertaking – that of reinvigorating locals’ relationships to oft-neglected bits of Varsovian public statuary. This questioning of the continued relevance and future siting of public sculpture continues a line of enquiry by Jankowski that has previously seen him create numerous life-size bronze Living Statues (2007) – simulacra of street performers posing as Julius Caesar and Che Guevara in Barcelona – as well as a giant socialist-realist sculpture based on an anachronistically luxurious photograph by one of the Mexican Muralists, entitled Monument to the Bourgeois Working Class (2012).

As with other films of Jankowski’s, such as Casting Jesus of 2011, the live, performative elements of Heavy Weight History have been documented in the style of scripted reality television, or specifically in this case as a convincing piece of outside broadcast coverage of a competitive sport, with a well-known Polish commentator on hand to describe the action. For his fourth solo show with Lisson Gallery in ten years, Jankowski is also presenting another recent film, Crying for the March of Humanity of 2012, in which an entire episode of a Mexican telenovela has been remade, except that the lines of dialogue have been replaced by actors sobbing and crying rather than speaking – extending the dramatic, climactic soap opera moment into something more like hysteria. Photo-realistic canvases from The China Painters series (2007-08), produced by copyists from the notorious ‘oil painting village’ of Dafen, complete Jankowski’s exhibition, while similarly highlighting the potentially serious ramifications of staging or altering reality, whether that manipulation happens through translation via mass-media or as a by-product of an inherent flaw in man’s nature.

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André Romão exhibition, The Winter of (our) Discontent, in 2010, at Kunsthalle Lissabon (Lisbon), deals with the imposition of political ideologies throughout history in the public space.