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CELEBRATION FACTORY

Artist(s)
Filip Markiewicz
Curator(s)
Catherine Hemelryk, Kevin Muhlen

Dracula is dead and returns to his tomb. The British post-punk band Bauhaus announced it on August 6, 1979: "Bela Lugosi is dead".

The first actor to have personified Dracula. The group uses the logo of the Bauhaus School, created by Oskar Schlemmer. Today, we all have become a little Bela Lugosi: the vampire dance of the European image can begin. It's time to put on our masks and drink the digital blood until our hard drive is formatted for eternity.

Fake Fiction (excerpt) © Filip Markiewicz

Celebration Factory by Filip Markiewicz is the product of a Europe in transformation and marked by deep crises, but also an artistic response to this new socio-political paradigm. Party and celebration become the vehicles of awareness, a questioning of the system that surrounds us or a resistance to the reign of fear.

Filip Markiewicz' artistic project does not intend to denounce the system or develop a form of political activism, but rather proposes an almost surrealist language that brings together various modes of expression: visual arts, performance, music, debate, celebration. Celebration Factory aims to find a fluid and artistic language in accordance with our society in perpetual motion.

The concept of Celebration Factory is to provide a presentation that evolves in space and in time, functioning as an experimental and artistic laboratory. This migration is, in part, an autobiographical mirror for the artist from the project's debut at NN Contemporary Art in Northampton (UK) in 2016, home to a significant Polish diaspora, and the artist's native Luxembourg where the show will be held by Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'art contemporain in 2018.

The Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman talks about a "liquid modernity" where the individual is in the centre. Nothing is fixed, the neoliberal world teaches us a new way of conceiving our existence. The aim of Celebration Factory is to try to represent this aspect of our society through the form of entertainment. The exhibition is not intending to be a kind of political activism, but rather to develop an almost surreal language consolidating different expressions, music and celebration; to find a liquid and artistic language fitting our moving and evolving society.

About the artist:

Luxemburger of Polish origin, Filip Markiewicz (b. 1980) is a multidisciplinary artist expressing himself through, a.o., drawing, video and installations thereby creating a coherent visual body of work using diversified media. The artist, who is always looking for explanations to our daily lives, explores the omnipresence of image and puts in perspective the message they convey. Applying criticism and a certain political twist to "the news", he underlines the vacuity of our overproducing visual world where news becomes reality, and not the opposite. While capitalism has become an ideology and banks the new cathedrals of mass expression, Filip Markiewicz interrogates some aspects of the European populations' discontent: social welfare, migration, wars outside our borders, religious integrism, the use of national and private wealth, the value of art as a reflection of culture. His willingness to go back to the pencil and the paper emerges from the need to use drawing as a widespread technique of expression that leaves a "real" imprint in a digitalised world of abstract evidence lead by forms and colours. Markiewicz was selected to represent the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) with his project Paradiso Lussemburgo, that was particularly appreciated for its cohesion though complexity and variety of artistic disciplines. (© aeroplastics)

Exhibitions

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Partners

The exhibition was produced in collaboration with NN Contemporary Art, Northampton (UK).

In partnership with ING and with the generous support of Ableton, Brasserie Simon and Lux-Échafaudages.