Piotr Urbaniec
Servus (Hi, 2024)
Courtesy of the artist
Piotr Urbaniec’s work revisits the Romantic imaginary of the Alps in a Post-Minimal DIY video performance. Placing himself as a hiker in an environment that ranges from flat to alpine, he highlights the absurdity of collective overinvestment in idealized topographical features, which mostly remain a distant illusion.
The video moves between the mountaineer’s ambitions of conquest and the vertigo of the foolish loner striving to reach the most sublime outlook. Urbaniec ironically embodies and subverts both figures in a series of experiments, at once poetic and nonsensical. His interventions serve to alter the perception of the landscape in relation to the body, recalling images from Land Art and referencing the work of Trisha Brown on gravity and verticality in dance.
The dramaturgy follows the changing topography, from hilly to rocky to cavernous, shifting from feelings of grandiosity to naive, makeshift ways of measuring a site that flirt with the big scale.
Piotr Urbaniec (1992, Kraków, Poland) is an artist who makes art from almost nothing and works with ephemeral media and materials, such as performance and weather. He had a first solo exhibition at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2016), and has participated in the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2018), the Yixian International Photo Festival (2017), and the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (2018), among others. Urbaniec’s performances have been shown at the Frascati Theater, Amsterdam, and Komuna Warszawa. He lives in Amsterdam.
Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ’24
With the kind support of the Polish Institute in Vienna
4K video, stereo sound, ca. 13 min., in loop
Camera: Iwo Rachwał
Sound: Stach Urbaniak
Extra legs: Fredrique Gagnon
Extra hands: Szymon Adamczak
Extra eyes: Romana Urbaniec
Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ’24
With the kind support of the Polish Institute in Vienna
