Bogdan Perzyński

Half Slave and Half Free

May 29th – July 3rd, 2021

The Liliana Bloch Gallery is proud to announce Bogdan Perzyński’s solo exhibition entitled Half Slave, Half Free. This phrase was used by Abraham Lincoln in 1858 at the Republican State Convention, then in 1960 by John F. Kennedy during his opening statement for his first presidential candidate debate in Chicago, Illinois. Perzyński’s recontextualization of the phrase makes references to big data, control, and misinformation . His show is a continuation of his research on theories about fragments, censorship, power, and aesthetic anarchism.

Over the last ten years, Perzyński has continued to work with various technologies, utilizing installation and performance work, redirecting his focus onto the vanishing distinctions between the local and the global, and returning to his long-held (1991) interest in the future's ecology. In pursuit of this open-ended stance, Perzyński dedicated himself to art as a fluid, interdisciplinary and invention-driven activity, and he has not strayed from this path since. For his solo show in Wellington, New Zealand (2011) he stated “I see my work more as an organism than an object; a living system that is capable of reacting to stimulus, growth, replication, and maintenance.” Born in Poznań, Poland, Perzyński now lives and works in Austin, Texas. Despite rigorous training in painting and drawing, he decided to focus on experimental processes, engaging the principles of many-valued logic with heightened empirical observation and the belief that single method inquiry cannot generate compelling results.

Since 1987 he is on the faculty in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where (1988) he co-founded the Transmedia area of studies, and where his teaching and art permeate and inform one another. For over 35 years, he has produced works that explore various methods including interactive computer instrumentation, remote aviation, sites and architectural settings. Between 2014-2018 he produced a series of nearly 700 photographic prints (TABLE) depicting trans-culturally occurring phenomena (e.g., communication, social organization, environmental control, or biological variations.) Around the same years he worked with Unmanned Aerial Systems claiming that these and other technical instruments replaced human visual observation in providing outcomes that otherwise would be inaccessible or better understood. The artist’s access to an aerial view reinforced his long-standing believes that no single discipline could usurp ownership of art, especially in the light of current environmental crises. The most revolutionary contribution to the truth in humanities, he believes, is to start with animals, to de-domesticate them, and support them all with creating conditions for their habitation. Further, he claims, art in its activist role needs to strive that biota and microbiota are given rights that equal the rights given to humans and their institutions.

Perzyński was trained in law at the University of Adam Mickiewicz and in architecture and visual arts at the Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Sztuk Plastycznych in Poznań. He held his first solo show (Film) at Akumulatory 2, an iconic non-profit art gallery in 1979, and represented the gallery in “Individual Mythologies,” a significant group exhibition in 1980. During 1979-1983, he taught at PWSSP. Throughout 1978-1983, he visited the United States, traveled frequently to Sweden and West Berlin, and in 1983 moved to Hamburg. The following year he relocated to Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara, before moving in 1987 to Austin, Texas.  He has presented and lectured on his work in Argentina, Brazil, China, Germany, Greece, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, Thailand, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States. He maintains an American and a Polish residence.

This exhibition is by appointment. Masks will be required to enter the gallery.

View Bogdan Perzyński’s performance: Half Slav and Half Free