August 27 – 29, 2019, 10 am – 1 pm
Many thanks to the artist & writer Dagmara Genda for her seminar Where do we draw the line? and discussing the works of our participants within the Studio Program at BAI | Berlin Artist Residency, Art School & Arts Incubator.
“In his last novel, Kosmos, Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz asks how many ways can we rearrange the 26 letters of the alphabet. The question is fundamentally about meaning and its dissolution, and the very fragile line separating them. This is what my work, in its different forms, is about. Whatever medium I use, I am interested in re-ordering the existing world through a re-articulation of boundaries, rather than escaping into a new one.
I think there is an absurdity to the practice of art which, in my case, is highlighted through the process of labour. The task of tracing every bit of texture found in stippled wallpaper, cutting out every image of snow from a book on the arctic, or rearranging the leaves of a bush into a spectrum of green, is a way of tracking something that cannot be held or defined. Both tracing texture and cutting out images are a way of illustrating or archiving, a way of building a system of knowledge. But what sort of knowledge is formed by these activities? What gets left in and what gets cut out? That is to say, how we define knowledge or identity is heavily dependent on where we draw the lines.
For the seminar I’d like to question where and how we draw lines or circumscribe boundaries, so as to open new interpretations and possibilities.” (Text by courtesy of Dagmara Genda)
Her art has been shown at the Arp Museum, Remagen; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; the Esker Foundation, Calgary; Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener + Area Biennial 2014, as well as numerous public and private venues across Canada, the US and Europe. Genda is currently completing a public art project for the expansion of the subway system in Toronto.
More information on the Dagmara Genda Website.
