Pawel Althamer and a Common Task

Polish artist Pawel Althamer has exhibited video, sculpture and performance at venues including the Venice Biennale, New York’s New Museum, and Berlin Biennale. He is currently showing video work in The Garden Hall as part of this year’s festival.

Paweł ALTHAMER,Common Task, 2009
Courtesy of the artist, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw, Open Art Projects, Warsaw and neugerriemschneider, Berlin

Common Task (2009) is an expanded project of collaborations between Althamer and neighbors in his block of flats in Warsaw. Interested in provoking unexpected and perhaps discordant social encounters, Althamer has travelled widely with his neighbors, sometimes using a specially designed gold-painted airplane, and transporting them to locations including Brasilia, Oxford and Brussels. Indeed, travel is central to Althamer’s enterprise, and provides a key to understanding his work within the context of this year’s theme, ‘See You on the Planet.’ Althamer’s practice advocates travelling to a strange location or culture, or else, approaching one’s locale as if for the first time and seeing it as an outsider, in order to notice previously overlooked things. This approach is made explicit by the shiny gold bodysuits Althamer and his neighbors wear (not to mention their airplane). The suits bear the name ‘Common Task,’ and recall NASA logos.
In the video on show in The Garden Hall – which is filmed roughly, with a handheld camera – we follow the Common Task as they explore the peculiar architecture of Brasilia (also the subject of Clara Ianni’s film, over at the Maison Franco-Japonaise) and attend a religious group’s ritual gathering. As equally strange as these encounters are Althamer and the Common Task’s encounters in everyday Warsaw. They feed ducks with a passer-by (who is more than a little perplexed by their golden suits), and in a supermarket, they meet a drunken old man who wonders at their identity, and reluctantly accepts a bottle of milk.
Peculiar, humorous, and ever so slightly menacing, Althamer’s video encourages us to think about vantage points and how, if we changed our own point of view, the world might look rather different.