Birthday

source: spikeisland

(1968) was born in Łódź, Poland where he now lives and works. He has performed and exhibited widely, including Les Promesses du Passé at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010), Palace Party, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2010), and The World as a Stage at Tate Modern and ICA, Boston (2008). He is represented by Galleria Zero, Milan, and Foksal Gallery, Warsaw.
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source: apriororg

Cezary Bodzianowski’s performances are more often “non-actions” than “actions.” Random-seeming interventions in the spatiotemporal social fabric, they employ scarcely perceptible changes to destabilize the daily rhythms of life for a brief moment. They often consist simply of the artist’s silent presence somewhere, at a particular time, and for a certain duration. The actions are generally documented, photographically or on film, and Bodzianowski himself invariably appears in the picture as both irritant and “artwork.” For the 5th berlin biennial, he made use of the garden in the rear courtyard at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, where he had lived during the run-up to the exhibition. Video documentation of some of the actions that he developed and realized during that period is also on show. For one action, Pianola, Bodzianowski turned the berlin biennial archive files, which contain details of all the artists from previous biennials, into giant “piano keys.” For another, Magneto, he stood outside various subway stations in Berlin with life-size Styrofoam replicas of the “U” sign from the city’s U-Bahn (subway system) that looked deceptively like horseshoe magnets. With these he “magnetically attracted” streams of subway users to the surface. Bodzianowski’s actions stretch the reality principle quite literally and point to ways of reading the world differently. It is not just the constructedness of meaning that he draws out; Bodzianowski also pits his fictions against those other fictions we accept as reality. He challenges hegemonic readings of the world, and ultimately suffers defeat. His artworks thus convey a tragicomic sense of the absurd, but one that never lapses into nonsensicality. Rather, it gestures toward a still, small core where Bodzianowski’s restrained contest with the world’s ingrained mechanisms begets a quiet poetry of defiance.
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source: galeria-arsenalpl

Cezary Bodzianowski (born in 1968), studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1988-1990) and obtained a diploma of Royal Academy of Arts in Antwerp in 1994. He lives and works in Łódź. In 1991 he received Pegasus prize for “art performances that revealed poetry within prosaic reality” and in 2004 his artistic performance was recognized in the form of the prestigious “Passports” Prize granted by Polityka, Poland’s weekly magazine, for his “imagination, consistent attitude, buoyant and disinterested art that causes the routine of our everyday life to rupture”.

Cezary Bodzianowski calls his artistic output as „a personal theatre of events”. He is a situation artist, the author of subtle actions – he stages short, full of absurdity stories and scenes, where he is a main character. The artist created his characteristic image: with an old-fashioned moustache, often accompanied by a trench coat, beret and black suitcase.

The Bodzianowski’s performances usually take place out of the gallery space where the artist in a refined manner, at times almost imperceptibly, interferes with reality. The viewers of his actions, in principle unconscious participants, are accidental passers-by who meet the artist in the streets, in shops, parks and other public places, chosen by him to perform unusual scenes disrupting daily rhythm of life and its routine. These ephemeral actions usually leave the audience in suspense, if the events, in which they participated, really took place.

Bodzianowski doesn’t always spread information about his actions, they sometimes take place in a narrow circle, at artist’s house, and the only viewer of the event is his wife, who makes documentation.

His works were presented at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (Four Times Paris (Pay Back), 2004), in Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne (Ein und Aus / In and Out, 2005), at 1602 Broadway in New York (Charlestone, 2006), in Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv (Sababa, 2009).