Kasia Fudakowski

Kasia Fudakowski created her performance Did I Ever Really Have a Chance? at the invitation of the Museo Marino Marini as part of the Alfred Jarry Archipelago programme: ’HA ’HA (Florence, October 2015). The ordinary public discussion between artist and curator that was announced in the programme begins to go awry as various interruptions, accidents and other bugs arise unexpectedly. The artist arrives late, the curator’s introduction gets longer and longer, the translator gets into a total muddle, and so it goes on until eventually the museum security alarm starts ringing. Far from being a mere film of the performance, the film  presented here is a careful montage of text and image, in which scenes are repeated in a stuttering kind of way and the intertitles oscillate between commentaries after the event and a pre-written script. All of which sows doubt on what one is looking at.

Kasia Fudakowski’s sculptures, performances and videos often take the form of crazy jokes or ironic monologues full of puns. People’s reaction to them is laughter followed by a moment of doubt in which they turn round to see if it really was funny. This sardonic humour comes from Fudakowski’s fondness for the verbal slips and shifts of meaning that arise out of appropriations or translations, whether linguistic or aesthetic. What interests the artist is the philosophy of comedy rather than an urge to set people giggling. She works at deconstructing the rules of ordinary stand-up comedy and thinks about the affective nature of laughter and the act of smiling. Fudakowski probes that slightly uncomfortable feeling that can set in between a comedian and his or her public.

Production Museo Marino Marini

Courtesy of the artist and Chert Gallery – Berlin

Performance Day is coproduced with the Playground festival, (STUK Kunstencentrum & M-Museum Leuven), with support from the Agency for Arts and Heritage of Flanders, as part of the project "Alfred Jarry Archipelago" initiated by La Ferme du Buisson Centre for Contemporary Art in Noisiel (France), Le Quartier Centre for Contemporary Art in Quimper (France) and Museo Marino Marini in Florence (Italy). The venture is part of Piano, the Franco-Italian art exchange platform, in collaboration with M-Museum and the STUK Kunstencentrum in the framework of Playground in Leuven (Belgium).