JESSICA LLEWELLYN TIMOTHY DWAYNE WOJCIECH YUNUEN, 2015
online commission Chisenhale Gallery, June 2015

video courtesy Chisenhale Gallery, London

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Earlier this year, WOJCIECH KOSMA presented, as part of the Interim programme of the Chisenhale Gallery in London, a new installment in a project started around 2011. This body of work takes the form of a series of performances and rehearsals that revolve around the human relationships, intimacy and self-exposure.

The concept is actually very simple; the performers, whose names make up the work titles (for the video above: JESSICA LLEWELLYN TIMOTHY DWAYNE WOJCIECH YUNUEN), improvise conversations, movements, and interactions by using their own experience without following a plot or a story. Finally, the performances, like the one presented above, are made of frank, raw and yet banal personal discussions, the ones we’ve all experienced in some form or another with lovers, family, friends or strangers.

Even if the protagonists are mostly professional actors and dancers (KOSMA recruited the people involved in his pieces not for their skills but rather by chance), the project engages notions of time, truth, reality, authenticity as well as voyeurism: questions that seem to have become ubiquitous in contemporary life since they are played out everyday on YouTube, on reality-TV shows and on social media.

Eventually there’s something about these pretty ‘naked’ performances that I find very truthful and generous. It doesn’t pass judgment on anything. It lets the viewer decide how to react to the material.

Here are a few links about WOJCIECH KOSMA that I recommend:

http://frieze-magazin.de/archiv/kritik/wojciech-kosma/?lang=en

http://www.adam-linder.net/the_unmarriageables.pdf

https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201509&id=55527

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