Distance & Sensibility

About

Calvert22 is delighted to announce Distance and Sensibility, featuring work by Pavel Büchler, Ergin Cavusoglu, Margarita Gluzberg, Marysia Lewandowska and Lily Markiewicz and curated by David Thorp. Each of the five artists taking part in Distance and Sensibility originates from a different part of Eastern Europe and they have each, for different reasons, decided to settle in the UK.

The spread of people around the globe has proved fertile ground for artists both as individuals as well as collectively. Frequently the focus in the West is on the Asian or African Diasporas but the largest dispersion of peoples around the world after the Chinese originates in Poland. Distance and Sensibility will seek to examine the sensibility that such movement has engendered in the work of these artists, whose roots lie in Eastern Europe.

Czech-born Pavel Büchler seeks to examine the way art has the ability to alter perceptions of seemingly ordinary objects and events. Ergin Cavusoglu, originally from Bulgaria, creates complex video installations exploring themes of transition, migration, globalisation and belonging. Through her work in performance, sound installation, painting and large-scale drawings Russian artist Margarita Gluzberg weaves together the themes of consumer culture, fashion, sport, Romanticism and desire. Polish-born Marysia Lewandowska places an emphasis on research, creating works that deconstruct and question social practices through film and sound installation. German-born artist Lily Markiewicz explores displacement, language and territory through the media of video, photography and sound. She seeks to depict everyday, domestic images that can be read as simultaneously familiar and foreign to the viewer.

The exhibition acknowledges that there is much more to the production of art than concerns with individual identity and considers the work of these artists as part of the global phenomenon that is contemporary art. The exhibition does not seek to address the position of the migrant from a sentimental or nostalgic point of view or as an extension of the notion of the ?other?. It instead invites the audience to reflect upon how the sensibilities that led to the production of these works were formed.