Matahari

MATAHARI 
25.05 - 25.06 2016
Project by Alicja Lukasiak & Grzegors Dorzd

Opening: Wednesday, 25 May 2016, 7 pm

Matahari project is the result of nomadic art project realized since 2015 in Indonesia by Polish artists Alicja Łukasiak and Grzegorz Drozd. The artists’ decision to leave their home country was influenced by the need to view the culture they had lived in from a distance – along with the perspective that only being ‘outside’ can give; as well as by the search for inspiration that comes from unfiltered experience. Thousands of kilometers later, the artists are still exploring the structure of nature and the forms in which it expresses itself, broadening their knowledge and finding sources of inspiration for their art, the works born out of direct contact with communities inhabiting remote islands. Their objective is simple: the creative process inspired by the culture, customs, just the everyday life of the people who, in the era of global changes that homogenize cultural differences, continue to cultivate the traditional model of living. This project are supported by Embassy of Poland in Jakarta. 
 
Grzegorz Drozd (b.1970) based in Warsaw and Southeast Asia, he has co-created with Alicja Łukasiak the project ZOR Foundation since 2003, zorfoundation.org. A versatile artist and a vigilant observer of reality. To describe it, Drozd employs his own language, constructing uncomfortable and unexpected situations, often with no script at all. By playing a game where his opponents are Convention and Ritual, he can take art beyond the brackets imposed by conventionality. An artist-manipulator who declares that “an artist is, to me, a society’s outcast and a criminal.” A relational and participatory creator, the author whose works display his personal emotions. In 2010, Drozd symbolically ‘abandoned’ the culture of the West, steering his nomadic journey towards the far South, in search for the lost paradise. Since then, he has inhabited ‘culturally open space.’
 
Alicja Łukasiak (b.1975) based in Warsaw and Southeast Asia. Łukasiak’s interest is nature, in the context of which she examines humans as the dominant species. On the one hand, she shows man’s destructive impact on the planet, and at the same time attempts to show the beauty and diversity of life. To her, life is a mysterious phenomenon, artistic creativity – a form of emotional story. In Łukasiak’s works, fauna and flora are subjected to personification. As a result, insects and plants are governed by the laws imposed on them by a superior life form – man.