Interview with Olga Skliarska
Photo: Wojciech Pacewicz
Lviv, Ukraine, 31.08.2019
Q: Why / when / how did you start to work with performance, what is your background, how did you arrive at doing performance?
It all began in 2015. I was a first year master student in the ceramic department at Lviv National Academy of Arts. That year I decided to apply to our local Performance School in Lviv, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art and Dzyga Gallery. As I remember myself (at that time) I preferred contemporary, experimental and provocative arts: something more than what the academic program gave to students. When I was a kid I was drawing and painting a lot. At the academy I started with three-dimensional ceramics, then an installation, and finally performance art and visual poetry. After my first workshop with Polish artist and curator Waldemar Tatarchuk I made my first performance as a student of the Performance School in Lviv, Ukraine. I was really excited about this huge field of possibilities performance art could open for an artist and how close it is for the viewers to feel a presence of this kind of art. I began enjoying it as part of my work. I felt that this kind of artistic expression was really close to me. From that time on I was doing performance art, participated in different workshops, projects, festivals and cannot imagine it being any other way. I am currently a member of two performance groups: Zahib (Ukraine) and Zapora (Poland/Ukraine).
Workshops:
2015 - Performance School, workshop with artist Waldemar Tatarchuk, Days of Contemporary Art. Lviv, UA.
2016 - Performance School, workshop with artist Janush Baldyga, Days of Contemporary Art. Lviv, UA.
2016 - Project “Performance Art Meeting” organized by Labirynt gallery, “Wroclaw the Capital of Culture”. Wroclaw, PL.
2017 - Workshop with artist Zhoo Bin, organized by Labirynt Gallery in the days of “Noc Kultury”. Lublin, PL.
2017 - Project “Synergia” artist and curators collaboration, workshop with artist Ewa Zarzycka, Labirynt Gallery. Lublin, PL.
2017 - Workshop with artist Tomash Shrama, Academy of Arts. Wroclaw, PL.
2017 - Project “Performance Platform Lublin”, workshop with artist Jurgen Frits. Lublin, PL.
2018 - Performance School, workshop with artist Bartolomeo Ferrando, Days of Contemporary Art. Lviv, UA.
2019 - Workshop with artist John Court “Continuous moving object”, University of Arts Poznan. PL.
2019 - Carbonarium Performance Festival, workshop “Sculpture Park”, with artist Johannes Deimling. Kyiv, UA.
I was a student of the Gaude Polonia scholarship program in the visual art field. During this time I made the performance project “Forms of Another Dimension” at the University of Arts Poznan in Poland in 2017. Since 2018 I’ve been a student of Department of Sculpture and Spatial Activities and mainly engaged in “Performance Art Studio UAP” lead by professor Yanush Baldyga and doctor Marta Bosowska.
Q: Can you tell us about your latest project?
“Without a blanket today” is one of my last individual performance projects realized during the Performance Art Studies program led by BBB Johannes Deimling. I came to this idea with my own piece of poetry written about an awareness of my personal status in society. The place I chose for my performance was a playground with a slide that was located around five minutes away from my accommodation. This suited me, as it was an individual work about the consciousness of one’s own status in the world.
|
The bad like an island,
An endless desert Everything, nothing. Feelings of thirst. Safe fear, Bold dreams In one person. Sounds to hear. Questions and answers In the same voice. Thoughts into systems, Without a blanket today |
Changing a situation
in the other direction. New music, Looks of strangers. Increase the radius, Deduce visibility, Erase the conturs. An ache. All lose at the level of search. In lines directing important are intersections. Result. |
Not at first glance
The flowers are fragrant, not all colors are so bright Silly laugher. Fast cars fly just like that. Summer is over, Winter has came. Reactions. Not from every experince Draws conclusions. The numbers has changed, Children still play. July, 2019 |
Photo by Yevgeniya Nekrasova
Link to the documentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KJFiSVI5j4
https://www.behance.net/gallery/84881353/Without-a-blanket-today?
Technical description of work:
I started by crawling on my lap, repeating the shape of the number eight with my movements. I also drank water under the slide in time of each stop. I tied a buoy to my waist and then rolled a watermelon from the top of the slide into the hands of one of my guests. Next I cut a watermelon on top of a pink raincoat and fed it to my guests. We put the remains onto the metal plate. I wore a raincoat and took the plate with me to the top of the slide. I untied the buoy and threw it to the groud and then threw what was on the plate, too. In the final moment of the piece I wore a plate on my head and rode down the slide. The work is full of bright red tones that I associate with childish openness and the optimism of people with warm hearts. Performance art is like a funny, colorful game, like a holiday. The movement of going up and than down is a natural one and we experience it since childhood when we play on the playground up until old age, when falling and going uphill become related to different periods of our life. Honestly it is also a visualization of everyday reality and I am reminded that red is also a color of danger.
Q: What role does performance art have in your life / artistic praxis? Do you also work within other fields, like installation, sculpture, drawing and other exressions? How do they influence / inform each other?
Performance art is the art form that somehow stopped me on my way forward in search of my own media since I became so curious and started exploring my own performance practices. At the same time I feel so free doing performance art and excited about how intermediate it could be. Quite often I prepare special object, ceramic or wooden. Sometimes I invite people from the outside to help me with preparations. I like that I can use all of my knowledge and abilities in this works, that I am creating it comprehensively. I draw sketches for my pieces and try to create or anticipate a situation, but still my favorite moments in performances are the unpredictable ones. I’m doing both short and long durational performances, both individual and group works. Performance art has become an integral part of my life; when I am engaged in some project I have a feeling that I’m doing well and doing what I should be doing. I never limit myself to a medium. I’m doing ceramics, visual poetry, installations, graphics, video, making different combinations of them: all that I need for my realizations.
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Performance art is the art form that somehow stopped me on my way forward in search of my own media since I became so curious and started exploring my own performance practices. At the same time I feel so free doing performance art and excited about how intermediate it could be. Quite often I prepare special object, ceramic or wooden. Sometimes I invite people from the outside to help me with preparations. I like that I can use all of my knowledge and abilities in this works, that I am creating it comprehensively. I draw sketches for my pieces and try to create or anticipate a situation, but still my favorite moments in performances are the unpredictable ones. I’m doing both short and long durational performances, both individual and group works. Performance art has become an integral part of my life; when I am engaged in some project I have a feeling that I’m doing well and doing what I should be doing. I never limit myself to a medium. I’m doing ceramics, visual poetry, installations, graphics, video, making different combinations of them: all that I need for my realizations.
<< Back