INDUSTRIADA, Katowice, Poland, 9-10 June

Following on from Connect:Katowice, the British-Polish, art exchange and final exhibition, presently on show at the Rondo Gallery, Katowice, the alliance of artists, Karina Kaluza, Monika Mysiak and Alex Roberts are additionally to be part of INDUSTRIADA, the Festival of Monuments of Technology on the 9-10 June.

The three-female, painting collective is installing some works at the Historical Museum Katowice, Rymarska Street, Nikiszowiec (a former mining community’s laundry & wash house for women and children). The display's aim is to drape their painted pieces over the old, large wooden drying racks, mangles and linen presses. Kaluza, Mysiak and Roberts feel this is an acute matching and appropriate, site specific way for their working research to be portrayed, involve the viewer; linking them back to the community that initially inspired their Connect:Katowice, exchange conversations.

The Connect: Katowice discourse: for Kaluza, Mysiak and Roberts, fabric and the ‘materiality of painting’ is something they all share. The curiosity to capture the transient nature of our human trace is of equal common importance.

With these two key interests in mind, Roberts initially shared her curiosities with the sense of community, derived from Katowice’s mining heritage she witnessed. They followed this lead and re-visited Nikiszowiec as a group. Their thoughts became anchored from and within this experience.

Setting their works together as a painting installation, a maze of fabrics, not entirely washed out and clean, they are investigating a sensory experience of painting. Fabrics are embroidered, dyed, painted, ruffled, pulled, bringing to mind not necessarily clean, folded and ironed laundry, but an ambiguous collection of cloths that question is this fabric, a painting, laundry, or a series of drifting associations that infer the in-between, or allude to something else? Is this the laundry before washing, leaving clear traces of human human presence, or the over-washed kind, familiarly loved that holds reminisce of human stains not wishing to be seen?

Whether it is the install at the Rondo Gallery, or the previous, testing opportunity shared at the Ply Gallery, London, and now the site-specific display at the Historical Museum Katowice, the painters have
“continued re-looking at local heritage, ancestry; British-Polish past relationships and our present, common European concerns,”
with for Kaluza, Mysiak and Roberts, fabric being the go-between.

For more information about the their exhibition within the museum, and the museum's program of events please click here

Maze of Fabrics, Rondo Gallery June 2017. Image credits: Alex Roberts