A Strange Encounter

Kandis Williams

Curated by Alex Baczynski-Jenkins and Franziska Sophie Wildförster

Kevin Space is pleased to announce "A Strange Encounter / Hey you" a performance series inviting three artists to work in the exhibition space and the surrounding area of Vienna’s Volkertmarkt throughout the month of July, each concluding with a public event.

"A Strange Encounter / Hey you" uses the figure of the stranger and the medium of the performed encounter to trace affinities among the artists' practices and examine the relationships between embodiment, space and otherness.

Following Sara Ahmed’s definition, the stranger is understood paradoxically as a form of recognition. Rather than failing to recognise the other, somebody is recognised as not belonging, as a body-out-of-place opposed to a body-of-a-place: “To recognise means: to know again, to acknowledge, and to admit. How do we know the stranger again?”

This series of performances feels along the contours of social spaces and their strangers to find the gaps and porousness of mis/recognition.

Zuzanna Bartoszek
Meditations 1–3

Zuzanna Bartoszek (born 1993, Poznań, Poland) lives in Warsaw and works in the extended artistic field of poetry with different text forms, drawing, and performance. Her work deals with intimate confessions and reflections traversed by an eroticism of consumption, social mediation, illness, and death. Your Guided Meditations are a series of poetic performances that Bartoszek has developed since 2016. They consist of simple ritual gestures accompanied by recorded readings of their poems to the fear and fetish of finitude.
Her last meditations were at Kem, Warsaw; Lava Festival, Krakow and Cell Project Space, London.

Her poems were, among other things, In magazines such as Lampa, Czas Kultury, Fabularie and Zwykłe Życie. Publishing published their first poem collection Niebieski Dwór / Blue Court. Their last projects include the group exhibitions "Ministry of Internal Affairs" in the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, "Perverts" at Cell Project Space in London and the performance "Meditation no.3" at the Lava Festival in Krakow.