artists: Jonas Nobel, Maja Hammarén (SE), Cathal Roche (IRL), Arek Pasożyt, Patrycja Orzechowska (PL)

PLEASE CALL STELLA! is exhibition that concludes the first part of LOCIS – the project of artistic residency and cultural exchange between three partner institutions from Poland, Ireland and Sweden: the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń, Leitrim County Council Arts Office and Botkyrka Konsthall in Stockholm. Realization of this project has been supported by European funds of EACEA program Culture 2000.

Started in September, LOCIS have brought together two young Polish artists: Arek Pasożyt (Torun) and Patrycja Orzechowska (Gdansk), an Irish Cathal Roche and Swedish Maja Hammarén to work with renown Swedish artist Jonas Nobel, who is a founding-member of the group Uglycute. Series of workshops and encounters of this five artists in Torun brought them to collaborate on the exhibitive project entitled PLEASE CALL STELLA!

Gathered around Jonas Nobel, the four artists spent hours talking and presenting their previous works and facing persistent language barrier. As Nobel states in his poetic description of the exhibition, language is such a blunt tool to talk about art; talking about your practice is hard enough in your native tongue – in English it becomes a struggle. Misunderstandings and understatements born in the arduous process of translation became a conventional way of communication with a lower degree of comprehension than the lowest resolution images of their works in Power Point presentations. To step out of this ‚Lost in translation’ impasse, Jonas Nobel decided it was high time for the real artworks to meet – instead of ideas, words or blurry images.

The title of the exhibition PLEASE CALL STELLA! is borrowed from a work by Cathal Roche  – a musical piece in which the artist improvises on one seemingly absurd English text beginning with the words ‚Please call Stella’. The text is only an excuse to present all possible accents within the English language. Roche is mimicking various intonations, creating a dense soundtrack of the show and filling the space between artworks which testify artists wish for collaboration ad reflection upon the theme of dialogue, language, translation and understanding. PLEASE CALL STELLA!  shows the process of meeting of the artists and their mutual engagements in each other’s work.

First edition of LOCIS will be concluded with a seminar which will held on 21st of February 2014, and will bring together all fifteen participating artists presenting projects realised in Sweden with Dominic Stevens, Elaine Reynolds (Ireland), Ewa Axelrad (Poland), Mattias Åkeson, Jorun Kugelberg (Sweden), in Ireland with Jarosław Kozakiewicz, Natalia Wisniewska (Poland), Ulrika Larsson (Sweden), Niall Walsh, Kathy O’Leary (Ireland) and here, in Torun, with Jonas Nobel (Sweden), Cathal Roche (Ireland), Maja Hammarén (Sweden), Arek Pasozyt and Patrycja Orzechowska (Poland).

LOCIS has been conceived as a knowledge-sharing project which seeks to create opportunities for younger artists to work together, regardless of their place of residence, and to enable them to establish collaborative relations and dialogue with internationally renowned artists/architects who are also involved in the project. Each residency-program engaged well known artists and architects such as: Jarosław Kozakiewicz, Jonas Nobel and Dominic Stevens. Even though the residential and research programs taking place in the three partner-institutions are independent, they all share common interest in the issues that concern space and how it can be used or transformed. This is because LOCIS, as the name itself indicates, is about local, locality, localization, location, locator… Therefore, LOCIS represents a research and artist-in-residence program which develops a set of artistic initiatives addressing the theme of place, site, location and topos, understood through the plurality of their potential environmental, social, political, economical or cultural connotations.

With the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union

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