Alicja Kwade’s exhibition Broken away from common standpoints is the first event in Six Ways to Sunday, a programme which every year sees Peep-Hole dedicating an event to a partnership with an international museum, becoming a temporary satellite project room for the museum in question. With Six Ways to Sunday Peep-Hole explores the programmes of six international museums with leading contemporary art programmes. The collaboration between the institutions involved aims to establish Peep-Hole and Milan as a production centre for the convergence of diverse approaches and methods, with a view to forging a network of international connections and exchanges over time. Each exhibition in Six Ways to Sunday is curated by the guest institution and Peep-Hole, and accompanied by a catalogue published by Mousse Publishing, giving rise to a series of six publications. The museum invited to open the series is Museion – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art – Bolzano.

Alicja Kwade’s work ranges across a vast spectrum of artistic media: sculpture, installation, photography and video, and uses a wide variety of materials, such as gold, mirrors and antique furnishings, clocks and lamps. Apparently simple in form, and often composed of everyday items, Alicja Kwade’s works explore themes like the authenticity and value of objects, as well as philosophical questions like the passing of time and the meaning of history.

With the project Broken away from common standpoints Alicja Kwade trasforms the Peep-Hole venue into a fairy-tale, festive landscape. Dozens of ballerina figurines collected by the artist over the years fill the entire exhibition space with their seductive forms. All from different periods and places, in their diversity and uniqueness the figurines of Weisses Gold (animal metaphysicum) (2010), all strike a similar pose, with their arms raised above their heads. They also have something else in common apart from their poses: they all look in the same direction. The artist has altered the face of each figurine, redesigning them to make them all look upwards. The antiquey, slightly kitsch appeal of the figurines combines with the erotic power of the pose and the almost religious ecstasy it contains. The spectacle of these dancing figures is reflected in a series of mirrors that assimilate and reproduce their exuberance and vitality. In Vom zukünftigem Hintergrund unter anderer Bedingung betrachtend (2010), the artist visualises a mirror sliding down a wall to the floor in seven different stages, almost “melting” from its vertical position down onto the floor. The eccentric, baroque feel of the colourful ballerinas interacts dialectically with the abstraction and formal rigour of the mirrors, and while the former are fixed, as if frozen in a moment of euphoria, in the mirrors this movement flows once more, going forward or back in time, enabling us to interpret the chronology of an event one way or in the opposite direction.

Broken Away from Common Standpoints is accompanied by a catalogue published and distributed by Mousse Publishing.

Alicja Kwade was born in Katowice (Poland) in 1979. She lives and works in Berlin. Her main solo exhibitions include: Grenzfälle fundamentaler Theorien, Johann König, Berlin (2009); Von Explosionen zu Ikonen (Piepenbrock Preis für Skulptur) Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2008); Junge Sterne Rauchen, Galerie Lena Brüning, Berlin (2007); Alicja Kwade, Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck (2006). Recent group shows include: Black Hole, Centro Cultural Andratx, Mallorca; Pragmatismus & Romantismus, Fondation Ricard, Paris (2009);The Krautcho Club/In and out of place, Projectspace 176, London; When a watch is seen from the side it no longer tells the time, Galerie Johann König, Berlin (2008); LichtWerke – Kunst und Licht seit den 1960er Jahren, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig – MUMOK, Vienna (2006).

With the support of: Consolato Generale della Repubblica di Polonia in Milano.