Saturday, August 3
1:00 to 5:00 pm
FREE, All ages
The Cube
Join us in The Cube for an interactive performance with Johnny Forever Nawracaj as they activate their exhibition, Diasporic Anchors for Future Memory.
Throughout the day, Nawracaj will scroll through google maps on satellite view to search for cobblestones in their home neighbourhood in Nowa Huta, Poland. In their youth, some streets on their block were recobbled as part of a restoration project. This prompted Nawracaj’s father to share memories of his experiences in those same streets fighting a militarized police force and using stones found on the road and in between streetcar tracks to defend himself and fellow protesters emphasizing with a sly smile the practicality of living on a cobbled street in times of revolution. Isolating the cobblestones in Photoshop, Nawracaj will print them out for visitors to cut out, handle, contemplate, and take with them or leave in a pile on the gallery floor.
Diasporic Anchors for Future Memory includes a video triptych of Nawracaj’s father speaking about the importance of throwing stones as a strategy of intergenerational community resistance to militarized state oppression in 1980s Nowa Huta, Poland. Through this performance, Nawracaj seeks to emphasize their lifelong pride in these actions and ask the question: in the western imperialist and colonialist context, who is uplifted for throwing stones at a military oppressor as an act of resistance and who is demonized, imprisoned, and killed for this same act of resistance?
Participants of all ages are invited to drop in and join Nawracaj at any time throughout the performance, and stay for as long as they like.
Johnny Forever Nawracaj, Gambletron, and zev tiefenbach’s exhibition Diasporic Anchors for Future Memory, curated by Craig Willms, is on view in The Cube until September 21, 2024.
Johnny Nawracaj, My Father on Throwing Stones in Nowa Huta, video stills, recording 2007, edit 2024.
Image courtesy of the Artist.
Janusz Marek Nawracaj, Untitled (Plac Centralny, Nowa Huta, Poland), c-print, 4" x 6", c. 2004.
Image courtesy of the Artist.