Panoramic Urban Performance

curatorial project: „Quarantena”
curator: Magdalena Zięba

In her Panoramic Urban Performance, which was carried out in one of the most recognisable business centres in the world – Canary Wharf in London, Kostecka made a statement about the phenomenon of globalization and the resulting de-humanisation of an individual, who seems to be lost in the money-governed world of the ‘liquid reality.’ From the point of view of the individual, Kostecka’s performance could be understood as critique of the situation of the contemporary migrant worker, who has to find his or her own rhythm in the chaos of a metropolis. The city became the backdrop for action and a huge installation concerning one’s own emotionality. Perceiving the city symbolically, Kostecka translated its dark pulsating energy into her own body movements. The performance was a travesty of Tadeusz Kantor’s Panoramic Sea Performance, which he carried out in Łazy in 1967. This happening was recreated in 2013 by Marina Abramović and Bob Wilson on a beach at the Watermill Center, New York. In this way, making a reference to Kantor, a guru of European avant-garde whose practice is also known in Great Britain (particularly in Edinburgh, due to Richard Demarco’s patronage), became for Kostecka an attempt to create a conceptual bond between a number of aspects: the centre and the periphery of artistic work, the forces of nature and the forces of civilization, and between the lives of contemporary Polish artists and their predecessors who created their works in the 1970s Poland, a country dominated by the propaganda. By imitating conductor’s movements, Kostecka copied. Edward Krasiński’s gestures from 1967 in order to reenact the past by recreating it.

> Magdalena Zięba

photo: Justyna Fedec