Ewa Partum

Ewa Partum

History

Ewa Partum (born 1945, Grodzisk Mazowiecki near Warsaw, Poland) is a poetry artist, performance artist, filmmaker, mail artist, and conceptual artist. Part of the first generation of Polish conceptual artists, Ewa Partum paved the way for feminist performance and body art, testifying to the political activism of the former Eastern Europe. Affirming that “any act of thought is an act of art”, she focuses on the political economy of signs and the materialisation of language in her actions and installations in public space, as well as in her mail art or visual or “active” poetry. In 1983, after finally obtaining her visa, she left Poland and moved to Berlin. In the early 1970s, after studies in Łódź and Warsaw, she founded the Adres gallery in her own apartment. The gallery remained active for five years and was dedicated to conceptual art, mail art, and theory. In the same period, she created her first installations and actions connected to poetry, in public space, or a natural environment: in The Legality of Space (1971), and Poem by Ewa (1971), the letters her poems form are cut out and thrown into the sea or the street.

Profile

Ewa Partum

Movies

New Horizon is A Wave
Director
A film by Ewa Partum
Being and Doing
archive footage
About Performance Art and its historical origins including its links with folk customs. The film includes extracts from the work of many different performance artists from England and abroad collected from 1979 to 1983, amongst them: Tibor Hajas (Hungary), Rasa Todosijevic (Yugoslavia), Iain Robertson (Scotland), Zbigniew Warpechowski (Poland), Milan Knizak (Czechoslovakia), Natalia LL (Poland), Ewa Partum (Poland), Jan Mlcoch (Czechoslovakia), Sonia Knox (Northern Ireland), Jerzy Beres (Poland) and Stuart Brisley (England). The film also records the Haxey Hood and Padstow Hobbyhorse folk dances from Lincolnshire and Cornwall respectively.
Announcing Silence
Costume Design
Self-identification
Director
Self-Identification is a performance show which accompanied a series of photo montage films shown in the Small Gallery. Ewa Partum, therein, presents herself naked in public places in Warsaw. During the show she goes out from the exhibition space into the city, where nearby the Wedding Palace she met a bride. In this manner she confronted the institution of marriage determining one of the core elements of femininity seen as a paradigm of personality made up by patriarchal culture
Change. My Problem is a Problem of a Woman
Director
Ewa Partum’s work entitled Change. My problem is a problem of a woman (1979) is the culmination and the turning point of a process which began with Change in 1974. The latter was an action in which the artist had half of her face aged using make-up and immortalized in a portrait posted in the streets of Warsaw. Up to that point, Partum had used make-up to glamorize herself, signing various words with her lips outlined in red and pressed against paper as she spoke 1. But in Change. My problem is a problem of a woman, Partum had wrinkles, varicose veins, and grey hair applied over half of her body while, reclining on a white podium, she recited passages from the critic Lucy Lippard and the artist VALIE EXPORT.
Drawing TV
Director
Using a felt-tip pen, Partum draws geometric figures on a TV screen which displays a news broadcast filled with propaganda delivered by the country’s counter-revolutionary party leaders. The artist lays bare the propaganda message of the media and their ideologisation.
Tautological Cinema
Director
"Tautological Cinema" is a cycle of short films exploring linguistic and cinematic structures
Active Poetry
Director
The poetic work of Ewa Partum consisted in scattering single alphabet letters into a non-artistic space: be it the open air, sea, or an underpass. This gesture led to the deconstruction of a language whereupon grammatical, syntactic and semantic structures were used to determine certain patterns of an artistic statement. Her poems were shaped by coincidence, which made their language more open and process-orientated. The confrontation with the elements associated with femininity (water, wind) made it possible to face the patriarchal patterns rooted in the language.