Installation view of ‘Songbook’ 2009
Wojciech Kosma – Songbook
21st August – 18th October 2009
An exhibition of cutting edge musical compositions by Polish artist Wojciech Kosma, in which art, artist and audience intersect. In autumn 2009 IMT hosted an interactive exhibition of Kosma’s scores, directions for musical pieces and art works, the majority of which had never been published or performed before.
Many of Kosma’s compositions use radical or bizarre methods of working with music and its relationship to the human body and ask alternately for specific forms of human interaction or endurance. His poetic and conceptual scores and performances combine elements of psychology and physiology, but also pornography, logic and irony, with traditional musical notation.
In Songbook the idea of the audience as performer sits at the heart of Kosma’s thoughts about art and music in his belief that to really hear a piece of music one must attempt to play it. Visitors to the exhibition were given opportunities to perform Kosma’s scores, alongside video performances of some of his works by Jeki Zaborov. Performances from Songbook, and other works, are online here and are updated as his project continues.
Wojciech Kosma lives between Berlin and London, working between art and composition. His compositions have been performed widely, most recently at Light Industry, New York, at Goldsmiths University in London, in the Chilean Embassy in Paris and in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. His works were also recently exhibited in Lyst in Overgaden in Copenhagen, The Real Thing in MU Eindhoven, Club Transmediale, CCA Zamek Ujazdowski in Warsaw and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 2007 he established the Wrong Ensemble who performed at IMT in 2008.
Wojciech Kosma – Songbook was curated by Pawel Kaminski of IMT, and supported by the Arts Council England and the Polish Cultural Institute.
