Polish contemporary artist Pawel Althamer (b.1967, Warsaw) incorporates social practice and relational aesthetics into his sculpture, installation, performance, and video work. For his first institutional exhibition in China, althaea will chiefly present two of his iconic works which explore the relationship between individual identity, social relations, and the making of art: Draftsmen's Congress and Venetians. In Draftsmen's Congress, Althamer asks museum visitors to draw at will on the floor and walls of the exhibition space, creating an open-ended dialogue among participants in which communication takes place by interacting with and responding to each other's drawn gestures. The result is a democratic visual conversation that evolves non-hierarchically and outside of the artist's control. 

Collaborative authorship plays a key role in many of Pawel Althamer's pieces. His UCCA exhibition will also includes a sculpture studio, in which Althamer's assistants scour Beijing collecting discarded objects and detritus off the street. The artist will work with his assistants to assemble these items into one or more sculptural pieces inspired by the city, which he will then cast at a foundry and display in the UCCA Lobby. Other collaborative projects have seen Althamer invite dozens of friends and relatives to travel the world wearing gold space suits in a quasi-sci-fi performance-video (Common Task), work with local artists to build a shrine in Brooklyn to displaced women (Queen Mother of Reality, Performa 13), and hire a man to live in a trailer outside his exhibition as a stand-in for the artist (Astronaut 2, Documenta X). The artist's longest-running collaboration is a ceramics workshop he teaches for Grupa Nowolipie, a class of students with multiple sclerosis and other disabilities. In both process and form, Althamer's practice aims to transcend notions of the isolated creative practitioner while reorienting social relations within art.

*image (left)
Photo by Jens Ziehe,
courtesy neugerriemschneider and Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw