Friday, 21 February 2014, Cheng Yu Tung Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Marysia Lewandowska (ML), an artists and currently visiting professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong gave an introductory artists talk explaining her practice. My previous knowledge about ML was limited to the work she did with Neil Cummings which caught my attention at the Anselm Franke curated Taipei Biennial 2012. It was titled “Museum Futures” and in a nutshell it was a futurological fictional video work addressing questions about how a museum of the future would, should or will look like.
When I entered, the talk has already started and for a while I wondered if I have entered an art performance – in the darkened room, slides with images (no text) were being projected onto the screen at regular intervals while ML was reading a text in a monotonous voice so familiar from a certain genre of video art installations with a voiceover. Only after some time I realized this actually was a lecture of ML introducing a work… Given the monotonous and speedy delivery in a room too dark to take serious notes, a lot of words said disappeared from the mind as quickly as they did from the ear.
I realized that “Museum Futures” was a rather un-typical work for ML. Most of her work was anchored in activating the public space or working with groups of people on workshop-like projects. ML invoked Bruno Latour and Hannah Arendt, as well as artists Michael Asher, Andrea Fraser and Martin Creed. ML’s social-practice-talk was packaged nicely in neoliberal criticism statements, and ended with the touchy image of artist David Hammons selling snowballs in his 1983 performance. From the little I saw and remembered from the talk, I found ML more convincing in the institutional criticism pose (e.g. “Museum Futures” which she did not mention or “Undoing Property” which she did mention) than in her public space projects (e.g. the Open Cinema sculpture/projection space).
When someone asked about the role of internet as a public space, ML highlighted its role mainly as a threat. This can be true from one point of view, but as a blanket statement is was a bit too one-sided for me. Given her the critical position towards neoliberal market economy, interest in institutional critique and the creation of public space, I also started to wonder what brings her to Hong Kong, which seems to encompass a lot of what she is opposed to in her works. Maybe the answer lies in one of her concluding remarks: “Artists make something out of nothing yet still offer a contribution to society…”