The people of Regensburg cannot overlook Paweł Althamer when the Polish artist comes to their city again next weekend. On the one hand, because this year’s Lovis Corinth Prize winner does not appear alone, but is accompanied by family members and friends, some of them in wheelchairs. On the other hand, because the group will be dressed in golden body suits when they walk through the city or can be found in front of the Ostdeutsche Galerie art forum. There’s a big Althamer exhibition going on there right now.
The Polish artist calls the performance “Common Task”, which he has realized at irregular intervals since 2008. Stimulated by the belief of the Dogon from Mali – Althamer insists on being connected to the “extra power of the universe” – he stages the performance as a kind of visit from extraterrestrials and thus creates productive uncertainty. But the trained sculptor, who regularly tests the limits of the art world, always involves other people in creative processes, and there are enough examples of this in the exhibition.
He has already been to Brazil, Great Britain and Mali on a common task trip
For the first common-task trip outside of Poland, he took off on June 4, 2009 in a fully occupied gold-painted plane operated by the Polish airline LOT to Brussels. The occasion was the twentieth anniversary of the first free elections in Poland. All passengers wore gold-colored uniforms with “Common Task” written on the sleeves. In the meantime, Althamer has been to Brazil, Great Britain and Mali/West Africa, among other places, for the joint task, sometimes with smaller, sometimes with larger groups of up to 150 people. But he also appeared in Munich, Minsk or Cyprus. So now Regensburg. “Being on the road together, sharing emotions and feelings and common impressions when you visit new places and finally recognizing where we are and where we want to go,” the museum quotes Althamer’s statement on “Common Task”.
If you want to get an overview of the diverse art of the sculptor, we recommend the exhibition in the Kunstforum. There you will also find Althamer’s wheelchair user sculptures. The artist has been giving ceramics courses in a center for multiple sclerosis patients since 1993. Some of the members of this “Nowolipie Group”, named after the street in Warsaw where the center is located, will come to Regensburg with them. It is questionable whether it is immediately apparent under which gold suit the inventor of the spectacle is hiding. Because Althamer likes to withdraw. As he once said, that’s the only way to set the right process in motion.
Pawel Althamer: Common Task, Sat., 13.8., 2-4 p.m., Sun., 14.8., 10-12 a.m., in front of the Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, Dr.-Johann-Maier-Str. 5, Regensburg.