TRIO

The work is composed of three simultaneous screenings; each contains 277 photos presented one after the other, always in the same order. Each screening creates a certain narrative about modern conflicts in the world. Photos constructing these stories come from TV news. In order to obtain them I became a virtual war photojournalist, in a manner of speaking – my actions were separated from the reality with a glass screen. Photos sequence is deliberately put out of chronological and geographical order, still, all of them relate to events from the last two years. They present mass manifestations, protests, street fights, police interventions, and finally war, devastation and death.

The images are accompanied by sound consisting of several hundreds of micro samples from broadly taken improvised music and free jazz. For the purpose of this exhibition I used a trio – saxophone, double­bass, drums – since, as I suppose, it gives the most expressive and direct message from all the possible instrument configurations. “Free” music is justly associated with transcendence, spiritual experience, sometimes even a religious one. However, we tend to forget that this kind of music was often involved in social and political matters. Many of leading musicians from the heyday of jazz had at least an episode of this sort in their artistic biography. Max Roach, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Art Ensemble of Chicago, and even Miles Davis from the beginning of the 1970s – every one of them, in their own way, by reference to their African roots and by sound abstraction created a message that defended oppressed black communities in the USA. On the other hand, Peter Brotzmann in 1968 Germany used the saxophone as a machine gun pointed at capitalism and consumer, thoughtless social behaviours. Similar leftist and even communist­oriented stands were taken by musicians from so called free­improv groups in Great Britain… None of these artists’ works, with their political involvement, lost their spiritual power and formal sophistication.

There are several reasons for which I decided to combine such type of music with paintings. Firstly, I wanted to point out that art can be important when its message is clear, without any loss in its autonomous values. Secondly, it is undeniable that there are real problems in the world, but it seems that art has stopped reacting to them and it has become self­oriented, thus the art is not doing very well. Thirdly, what is important to me are the questions whether images that I show are viewed as significant messages, do they have any meaning at all, does the constant information flow make people lose their sensitivity and lead to indifference to dramas, which are not directly related to us.