AVANTI POPOLO. WARREN’S VISITATION
a project by Elka Krajewska and Gregor Neuerer
October 11, 2020
A night-cap with Warren at Salvator Rosa
10pm, Oct 11, 2020 (streaming on facebook / instagram)
When most guests have gone and all dirty plates are piled up,
when bottles are empty,
we sit at the table and watch the tea grow deeper brown [in Livorno, more greener than brown, a ginseng tea brought from the forbidden city right after 2017’s fall flood.]
For what we understood after this brief visitacione, a tea ritual would migrate with him from one part of the world to the other. Before the tea, we drank wine along with Warren’s wrapped salame that he would treasure inside his bag along books and other objects, which accompanied neatly his migrations and table gestures, as bird’s ritornellos. Small gesture-gifts that he presented each day for the rest of his stay in our/his house in Livorno.
He loved the Bulgarian cup so much (the one in the picture taken by Juan Pablo Macías in his kitchen table), that he joyfully adopted it for his daily ginseng.
There is a long five minute fragment in “War After War”, Simon Leung’s film about Warren, when Warren sings to dead and dying flies, in Italian “Forward people, towards redemption”. He pushes them around with his finger as if to wake them to live again.
The deep hope for redemption can only be shared at a certain hour, and only among friends.
This the Warren hour, we summon when we miss him.
On Oct 11, 10 pm we will make space together to invoke the Warren Hour, brewing tea at Salvator Rosa.
Born in Warsaw and based in New York City and Vienna, Elka Krajewska is an artist shifting through various media, utilizing elements of her biography, contemporary interdisciplinary art historical strategies and whose work is often based on collaboration. She is also the president of Salvage Art Institute, which she founded in 2009 to articulate the nature of artworks declared “total loss“ by insurance companies and officially removed from art market circulation. Her work is in numerous private collections and in the permanent collection of The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Her solo exhibitions include Soloway Gallery, NY (2016) and Arsenal, Bialystok, Poland (2013). Her ongoing collaboration with KrajM, the artist’s mother, was featured at Lokal_30 gallery during the 2019 Warsaw Weekend.
Gregor Neuerer, born in Innsbruck, lives in Vienna and New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Glass and Not Glass, as part of the public art program 2016, “Various Tones”, Cathouse Funeral, New York 2015; “Pollen”, Kehrer Gallery Berlin, 2015; „Bilder für ein Büro“, Babenbergerstraße, Wien, 2013; „Villa“, The Soap Room, Innsbruck, 2012; „Left but a trace“, Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2008; Group exhibitions include „Arcadian Boxes“, Siakos Hanappe Gallery, Athen, 2012; „Biografie der Bilder“, Camera Austria, 2012; „Curated by_“, Galerie Raum mit Licht, 2012; „ Neither From, Nor Towards“, Art Pavillion, Zagreb, 2010; „ Undisciplined“, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Wien, 2008; „Weak Foundations“, Momenta Art, New York, 2008; „Behind Faces“ Galerie Martin Janda, Wien, 2004. He is the editor of „Untitled (Experience of Place)“, Koenig Books London, 2003.
Together the artists have worked since 2015, publishing their common projects annually. Their collaboration at Carico Massimo in 2018, centered on flooding and the historical openness of city of Livorno, produced “Fall Flood - Higher Ground” a spatial installation and book.
salvator rosa