Performance Platform Lublin festival, which has been taking place in Lublin every autumn since 2009, has found its permanent place among the cultural events of the city and remains one of the most important international festivals of performance art in Poland. It stands out due to its fresh approach and constantly updated formula in which the notion of “a festival” is a flexible and transformable form. The point of departure for the last year’s edition was the 35th anniversary of the first Polish performance festival “Performance and Body” (1978). For this reason, the festival assumed a form of a meeting between artists-classics and debuting artists. Archival documents and films created the historical context which provided a basis for a meeting and discussion concerning the functioning of performance art in the period of the Polish’s People Republic as well as the contemporary interests of performance artists.
This year, the festival focuses on the emerging performance art – we invite the artists who have debuted recently, who are taking their first steps in the domain of ephemeral art, who find themselves at the preliminary stages of their artistic path. The festival is going to indicate the current directions of exploration in action art as well as the limits, expectations and challenges the artists set for themselves. As usual, the formula of the festival will abound with various forms of interactions – presentations of performances, film screenings, as well as events in the space in and around the gallery. Apart from the presentations of performance art, the programme of the festival includes a film part (Video Programme) during which selected film documentation of performances as well as videoperformances will be presented. It points to performance art as a living and pulsating phenomenon, arising from an inner need to create beyond the strict division into media, a resultant of the reality and the inner world. What is happening outside and what is surging inside encounter one another in the form of surprising constellations in performance art. It may be the reason why it constitutes a type of art endowed with the power of touching the most sensitive chords of the human soul. Performance Platform Lublin will indicate various directions of thinking about ephemeral art, the strategies of activity and attitudes, forms of marriage with technology, a dialogue with other fields of art, the everyday life and other people.
Performance Platform Lublin will take place on 17-18 October 2014 in the Labirynt Gallery in Lublin.
