The first in a series of four artist walks is The Letter, a performance work by Goshka Macuga.
Led by Adam Chodzko, artist and senior lecturer in Fine Art at the School of Music and Fine Art at the University of Kent, the performance will involve seven Fine Art and Event & Experience Design (BA and MA) students walking an enormous letter (over 10m long), as a group, dressed as Polish postal workers, from Chatham Historic Dockyard, in order to deliver it to Goshka at the Kantorbury symposium on the University’s Canterbury Campus.
The tapestry is a several meter long postal envelope made of textile, bearing the address of the Jarman Building, University of Kent. It refers to the famous happening by Tadeusz Kantor carried out in 1967, but also to the potential tensions occurring between art institutions and the society. At the heart of these tensions lies the censorship in Polish art after 1989, the period sometimes referred to as the cold war of artists against the society, and marked by attacks targeted at artworks, artists, curators, directors, and institutions, often committed on anti-Semitic grounds.
To document those difficult times, Macuga decided also to embrace within the show the hate mail addressed to Zach?ta and its then director, Anda Rottenberg. The Letter is a testament to those struggles, as well as to the ongoing transformation in the society, which has to confront its fears and prejudices in order to fully accept artistic freedom.
Artist Walks is a collaborative project with the School of Music and Fine Art at the University of Kent. It is supported by Kent County Council.
Interdisciplinary artist, born in 1967 in Warsaw, Goshka Macuga is now based in London. In 2008, she was among the four nominees for the prestigious Turner Prize, awarded each year to the most outstanding young British artist. Her practice moves beyond the artist’s traditionally perceived role into a form of ‘cultural archaeology’. Despite incorporating traditional media, such as sculpture, drawing, painting, photography and film, she creates installations in which she also appropriates the work of other artists, archive materials, ready-mades, combining them with objects of her own making. Macuga appropriates the techniques and tactics used by curators of exhibitions or archivists (because of this, her art is often compared to that of Marcel Broodthaers). Macuga has been exhibiting internationally at major museum and galleries since 1999. In 2016 she has a solo exhibition at the New Museum, New York.
We worked with Adam Chodzko and students from the University of Kent to explore artist walks as possible alternatives to artist talks. They aimed to test the proposition that a walking journey with an artist could be as valuable as hearing her or him address a lecture theatre, and that sharing a range of sights and sounds could reveal something that slides and video clips do not.
Information about the artists and the politics, history and imaginative potential of the landscape being walked through were disseminated before/after in a document in order to keep the walk itself as ‘present’ as possible.
Walkers were invited to mix and mingle during the walks, with an emphasis on informal conversation. Midway through the walks, students presented a set of questions to the artists which were later be collated, with the artists’ responses, via a blog for each walk.
Each route was designed to culminate at a point along the Medway estuary and river Swale, forming a string of reference points from which the connections between the walks can be contemplated.