Close Up #4: Elka Krajewska presents Salvage Art Institute
Convened, led by: Sebastian Cichocki, Kuba Szreder
Monday, April 4, 7pm
Auditorium of the Emilia Pavilion, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilii Plater 51
The next meeting in the Close Up cycle will host Elka Krajewska – artist, founder, and director of New York’s Salvage Art Institute (SAI), also presented at the Making Use exhibition.
The Institute takes care of “no longer art” – objects that were pronounced a “total loss” by an insurance agency and removed from art market and institutional circulation. SAI considers the legal, intellectual, and economic consequences of declaring artworks as a “total loss”: What are the circumstances in which some of those objects leave storage units and return to the market? How do artists approach their “total loss” work? Can such artworks “return to life” from a legal point-of-view? SAI’s activity was popularized by Ben Lerner’s book “10:04” (2014).
Due to the particular character of the Institutes’s activity, which deals with art’s “afterlife,” the meeting will take place on a Monday, when the museum is usually closed for visitors. Entrance to the meeting will be possible via the ramp at Pańska street from 6:45 p.m.
Elka Krajewska is an artist. She graduated from the University of Warsaw and Yale University School of Art (New Haven, USA). She creates films, videos, performances, and object-based work. Founder of the Salvage Art Institute. Krajewska works with the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, among others. She lives and works in New York.
About the cycle
Weekly meetings are an occasion to engage more closely with the processes and practices presented at the exhibition Making Use. The Close Up model is intended to examine activity that works on a 1:1 scale and to review such practices as they intersect with the various fields of life. The meetings will steer clear of the lecture format, instead adopting a more open form of discussion, seminar, and workshop. The aim of the cycle is not only to gain a more profound understanding of the practices discussed, but also to activate and contextualize them. The cycle is conceptualized and convened by the curatorial team of Making Use. Select meetings will host other participants of the project.