Friday 1 May 2009

General Information
Main pay bar in South Duveens 18.00-21.30
Pay bar in Room 9 18.30-21.30
Refreshments available in the café and in the Manton Foyer on Level 1 18.00-21.30
Restaurant Tasting Menu for 19.30 sitting £60 per head
Main Shop Level 2 open until 21.40
Collection Displays open 18.00-21.40
Half price entry to Van Dyck and Britain

Celebrate POLSKA! YEAR with Late at Tate Britain. Explore the relationship between Polish and British culture through a major display of Polish and British symbolist art and a fine selection of Polish film, interactive art and talks.

Polish Connections is a part of POLSKA! YEAR in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute in London and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. POLSKA! Year consists of almost 200 cultural events celebrating Polish culture and creativity to take place throughout the UK in 2009/2010.

m.bunio.s hit maker & VJ Jakub Wesołowski
Room 9
18.30-21.30

This audio-visual feast will explore various Polish-British connections. Using images of both recent and historical Polish migration, art and other cultural inspirations the artists will be experimenting live for the Late at Tate Britain audience.

Wyspiański Projections
South Duveens
18.00-21.30

The South Duveens will be transformed with projections of Stanislaw Wyspiański's stained glass window designs. Wyspiański was a Polish playwright, painter and poet, as well as interior and furniture designer. A patriotic writer, he created a series of symbolic, national dramas inspired by the artistic philosophy of the Young Poland Movement. Wyspiański was one of the most outstanding and multifaceted artists of his time in Europe. His pastel Apollo (1904) is in Room 16 as part of Symbolism in Poland and Britain display.

Symbolism in Poland and Britain
Alison Smith, Head of British Art to 1900 at Tate Britain, Piotr Kopszak of the National Museum in Warsaw, and Andrzej Szczerski of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków will be discussing the Symbolism in Poland and Britain display (on until 21 June 2009) and the role of Polish artists and their changing relationship with Britain in two talks this evening.

BSL interpreted by Tracey Tyer, Deaf host Melissa Mostyn-Thomas

The Polish-British Relationship
Room 16
18.45
Talk led by Alison Smith

Symbolism in Poland
Room 15
20.00
Talk led by Andrzej Szczerski and Piotr Kopszak

Polish Abstract Film 1933 - 2004
Auditorium
19.00-20.00
20.30-21.30

An eclectic mix of abstract film by Polish artists curated by Lukasz Ronduda, art historian, art critic, and curator at the Archive of Polish Experimental Film at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. Films by Stefan Themerson/Bruce Checefsky, Tadeusz Kantor/Mieczyslaw Waskowski, Andrzej Pawlowski, Miroslaw Balka, Wilhelm Sasnal, Elka Krajewska, Anna Orlikowska, Piotr Wyrzykowski, Ryszard Winiarski and Józef Robakowski.

Liquid Music
Duffield Room
Performances at 19.30 and 20.30

Jon Wozencroft will present a rare screening of his film "Liquid Music", made to the music of Christian Fennesz. The film challenges the notion of the sync between sound and image by providing a parallel yet sympathetic narrative to the abstract/laptop-generated status of Fennesz's sound, expressing its meditative, quicksilver mutations.

The film is free of any processing and post-production, whilst holding a mirror to the digital language of after-effects and virtual environments. It takes the tenets of digital media - the bias towards 'liquidity' and 'immersion' - and locates their starting point in the natural world, the power of the sea, the movement of water through physical space as a mode for exploring these energies and their effect on human perception.

Janek Simon will provide a real-time counterpoint to the film, using a range of optical and electronic devices that express the shape-shifting qualities of "Liquid Music".  

Jon Wozencroft is the editor of Touch, an audiovisual publishing project he set up in 1982. He is a senior tutor in sound and moving image at the Royal College of Art in London.

Janek Simon is an artist, former VJ and author of interactive installations, videos and objects. Simon takes inspiration from computer games, Internet and the archive and lives and works in Kraków.

Stefan and Franciszka Themerson
Lightbox
18.00-21.30

Stefan Themerson and Franciszka Themerson had a significant influence on the art and philosophy of the avant-garde of Eastern Europe during the 1930s. They are considered to be the most important experimental film-makers in pre-war Poland.

They produced five films in Poland between 1930-7 (Pharmacy, Europa, Moment Musical, Short Circuit, The Adventures of a Good Citizen) and two films made in exile in London during the second world war (Calling Mr Smith and The Eye and the Ear). Of these seven works only the last three, presented in this Lightbox display, have survived. The remarkable collaboration, invention and technical experiment that distinguished their career extended to a broad range of interests from film, photography, literature and art to design and publishing.

Art Now: Tony Swain
Temperature is here too

A sheet or pasted together page of newsprint gives Tony Swain both the physical base and conceptual starting point for his evocative and dreamlike paintings. The imagery is built up by painting over the collaged newspaper in layers, obliterating most of the original text and photography. The fragments that are allowed to remain are transformed by their inclusion in his imagined landscapes and abstracts. Swain, who lives and works in Glasgow, has created new work for the Art Now space.