Monika Czyżyk is a Polish visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland. Currently she is IASPIS artist in residence in Malmö. She works primarily with dirty media: moving images, VR within the context of experimental documentaries and socially engaged projects.

In the presentation, Czyżyk will focus on the film Almanach produced during the residency at Inter Art Center, in collaboration with composer Neil Luck. The excerpts of the film will be presented together with the VR work Mycelium Orgasm Report, made in collaboration with Gabriel de la Cruz and Neil Luck. 

Alamanch is a visual, performative, musical, and fundamentally tentacular project, manifesting in a number of outcomes of different forms: digital film, sound recordings, live performance events, VR environments and clay paintings. Almanach is set primarily in unnamed and surreal rural and urban locations populated by musicians who work with natural elements and materials in unconventional and transformative ways. Conceptualized as a work of docufiction it features characters who are themselves professional musicians, but are reframed or recontextualized by locations, staging conceits, or quasi-narrative direction. These performers/characters were selected because of a common feature in their practices. They all engage with elemental forces in music making (earth, air, water), transforming these natural forces in quasi-magical ways. It is through this fundamental quality of transformation that film navigates the liminal spaces between genres of documentary and fiction.

Czyżyk will also present her commission for the exhibition Gränstrakt/Borderland at Malmö Konstmuseum, opening on May 17^th, consisting of a monumental site specific clay painting on glass.

By the end of the presentation she will invite the audience to join in a circle to process dry clay from the Scania region. Inspired by various forms of work songs we will perform 3 Clay songs, that consists of grinding and sieving clay, and breathing with it. Clay songs composed by Neil Luck and Monika Czyżyk.

The event is presented by IAC in collaboration with Malmö Konstmuseum and IASPIS.

Read more about Monika as IASPIS resident at IAC here.