Act IV: I Could Live In Africa

2009 Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art Exhibition

Mar 15 to Apr 19, 2009

“What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. ” (Ernest Hemingway)
When it comes to determining what significance morals have on our social system today, there is no clear-cut answer. Morals make the world go round, and they are an indispensable basis for social existence among people. They leave no room for skepticism or ambiguity. In this sense, morals are Truth’s big sister. Like in Hemingway’s sarcastic statement, moral standards these days are defined more by individual people than by societies.

Since the beginning of the modern age contemporary artists have explored the failures and shortcomings of our social systems. Over the past few decades, countless exhibitions have focused on this subject. One exhibition that fits this mold is “I Could Live In Africa,” which examines the relationship between contemporary art and punk in Poland during the late 1970s and 80s. It focuses on phenomena that often took place hidden from plain view. What punk and art in Polish society had in common during this period was the need to oppose the status quo: the communist regime, politics in general, the prevailing moral and aesthetic cultural standards. To the Eastern Europe of the time “No Future,” the slogan of the punk movement in the west, was no different from the dead-end future the ruling regime offered its people. Underground art and politics held the promise of a new and better future .

The title of the exhibition “I Could Live In Africa ” was taken from the 1983 eponymous documentary film on the Polish punk band “Izrael” by the Dutch filmmaker and screenwrit er Jacques de Koning. Under the martial law that was in place in Poland during the early 1980s, as eminal underground music scene developed that found its expression mainly in punk and new wave. In an article that appeared in the punk and art fanzine “Post” in 1981 the author Piotr Rypson, who is well known today as a curator and art critic, compared Polish punk with the early twentieth-century Dadaist and Futurist movements. Rypson recogniz ed that the Polish punk movement was using cultural means to protest and attack the state’s practice of monopolizing, sanctioning, and controlling art to its own advantage. In addition to Jacques de Koning’s film, the exhibition presented documentaries and work by Miroslaw Balka, Jozef Robakowski, Darek Skubiel, and Michal Tarkowski, among others.

Morality

The exhibition is part of the year-long leitmotiv Morality.
Morality incorporates a changing constellation of five exhibitions, a discursive web platform, film program, performance cycle, symposium and book.

Curators: Lukasz Ronduda, Michal Wolinski

Initiated by Nicolaus Schafhausen

Artists: Mirosław Bałka, Mirosław Filonik, Marek Kijewski, Andrzej Łopiński, Krzysztof Bednarski, Wiktor Gutt, Mirosław Filonik, Waldemar Raniszewski, Jacques de Koning, Zbigniew Libera, Luxus artzine, Włodzimierz Pawlak, Józef Robakowski, Darek Skubiel, Zdzisław Zinczuk, Marek Sobczyk, Jerzy Truszkowski

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