Agnieszka Grodzińska (b. 1984, lives in Poznań and Szczecin) is an author of installations, paintings, drawings, and videos. She uses the techniques of multiplication, reproduction. She makes artist’s books, does research, and writes about art. She earned both her doctoral and postdoctoral degrees from the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts in Poznań. Grodzińska runs a painting class at the Academy of Arts in Szczecin.
Magdalena Starska (b. 1980, lives in Poznań) is an author of drawings, performances, and installations. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, she works as assistant in the Studio of the Shaping and Transformation of Space at the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts in Poznań. She is interested in community situations, in working with people, but also in individual experiences, such as meditation.
Banquet in the Basement, 2022, installation, courtesy of the artists
Banquet in the Basement is an installation that continues an over-year-long exchange of drawings and activities as part of the Re-act-oo project. The artists are interested in gestures and rituals performed towards or against the everyday and its routine, in practicing art through relationships, objects, and situations absorbed from the socio-cultural environment. Grodzińska and Starska invite the visitor to the table, for a banquet in the basement, serving their memories, thoughts, and suggestions prepared on the occasion of the feast. In the partly underground space, far from the hubbub and rush of the ground floor and daylight, without artificial gestures and smiles, they let one sit like in a cave full of shadows and experience art from up close at a shared table. Grodzińska and Starska practice art usually in domestic spaces: drawing, cutting out, while feeding their families and doing the daily chores. They arrange and set the non-rational structure of the table where stains can well be seen on the tablecloth, bearing witness to the unsubordinated, uncouth, and often uncontrollable everydayness.
Venue
Instytut Sztuk Wizualnych, ul. Wiśniowa 10