Pawel Althamer

Interview : Adam Szymczyk is Director of Kunsthalle Basel. He was one of the founding directors of the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw, whene he organized key exhibitions of the first wave of artists in post-communist Poland, including Wilhelm Sasnal, Monika Sosnowska and Pawe(...) Althamer. In 2008 he co-curated the 5th Berlin Biennial with Elena Filipovic and in 2010 was one of the ten curators of Phaidon's Creamier. In 2011 he was the recipient of the Walter Hopps Awand for Curatorial Achievement.

Survey : Roman Kurzmeyer is a critic and curator based in Basel, where he is Professor of Art Theory at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst. He has authored many books, including monographs on Bill Taylor, Helmut Federle and, together with Tobia Bezzola, a comprehensive study on the curatorial work of the late Harald Szeemann (2007). Since 1999 he has been curating an art programme at Atelier Amden in Switzerland, where he invited Althamer to create a work in 2001.

Focus : Suzanne Cotter is Curator of Exhibitions at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project. Prior to that she was Senior Curator and Deputy Director at Modern Art Oxford, where she organized Althamer's first UK solo exhibition in 2009.

Artist's choice : Childhood has always been a central theme in Althamer's work. Included in this book is « Mezalia », a short story by Marek Sieprawski about the friendship between Two boys and their toy sailboat.

Artist's writings : Since the late 1990s Pawe(...) Althamer and Artur Zmijewski have been engaged in an ongoing dialogue about the purpose of art and life. The two conversations included here took place in 1997 and 2003 and highlight the interests and philosophies of two of the most influential artists of their generation.

Pawe(...) Althamer (b. 1967) originally trained as a sculptor, but his work also bears the marks of a social, collaborative, participatory art that is concerned less with producing objects than with composing human interactions. Often dematerialized to the point of invisibility, this work also increasingly enlists human participants, often in what the artist describes as « reality directed ». For Motion Picture (2000-04) Althamer choreographed actors to perform everyday actions in a public square at the same time over the course of several days. Viewers, if they didn't know what to look for, could not know whether they had seen the artwork at all. Another major element of Althamer's work is institutional critique. For a 2003 exhibition at his Berlin gallery he transformed the high-design space into a litter-strewn shell, essentially returning the gallery to its dilapidated pne-gentrification state.

But perhaps the defining feature of Althamer's work is the artist's own body and its expérience of the world. This interest takes different forms : sometimes larger-than-life self-portraits (as in the giant nude Balloon he raised over Milan in 2007 and Bruges in 2010), sometimes documentation of his experiments in consciousness (as in eight 2003-04 videos of the artist undergoing hypnosis or ingesting psychotropic drugs). His work with non-artists could even be seen as a fragmented self-portrait, giving others the chance to step into the role of the artist, often with surprising results. Since 1994 he has run a ceramics workshop for adults suffering from multiple sclerosis, and their creations have since been exhibited at galleries such as London's ICA (2008) under the name Pawe(...) Althamer & Nowolipie Group.

This focus on the communicative power of art rather than on the objects it créates is central to Althamer's work, placing him at the forefront of current developments in contemporary art. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at museums such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2006), the Vienna Secession (2009) and Modern Art Oxford (2009), and included in Documenta 10 (1997) and at numerous international biennials, including. Berlin (2006), Istanbul (2006) and Venice (2003).

In the Interview Adam Szymczyk discusses with Althamer his life and motivations, and the implications of his social and experimental art. Roman Kurzmeyer's Survey analyses the historical context in which Althamer's practice started, covering his career from the early sculptures through to his interest in human interaction, and how this eventually translated into works that place the viewer's own consciousness in the starring rôle. Suzanne Cotter focuses on Common Task (2008-present), a series of documented science-fiction-inspired actions and activities performed by a group of people from Althamer's neighbourhood of Bródno in Warsaw. For Artist's Choice, Althamer has selected « Mezalia », a short story by Polish writer Marek Sieprawski that inspired a collaborative work between Althamer and filmmaker Jacek Taszakowski in 2010. Artist's Writings include two conversations between Althamer and fellow artist Artur Zmijewski that they cover a wide range of topics, from art to life and religion.