7 Dec 2018

Events

Travelling with my Inflatable Room

Travelling with my inflatable room is based on a performance I did over a period of one month, when I travelled in a van with the inflatable room (a latex imprint of a room from my Montreal apartment) and camped in it at different urban (local parks, underground abandoned basements, private and public backyards, unoccupied buildings, street corners) and rural (parks, campsites, abandoned villages, no man´s land) locations across Canada. In this piece, by combining my personal experiences of displacement with the history of North America I wanted to connect the ideas of home and nomadism that denies the dream of a homeland, with the result that home, being portable, is available everywhere, and through the enduring relation with the most unpractical tent that involved getting up every two hours to re-inflate so it wouldn´t collapse and suffocate me, reflect on the elements of human failure and vulnerability. It is the juxtaposition of the everyday and mundane with grandiose that I was interested in as means to create significance of these, otherwise insignificant moments.

Ana Rewakowicz is a Polish-born, Ukrainian artist and researcher living in Montréal, Canada. She received her BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto and MFA from Concordia University, Montréal in 2001. She works with inflatables and explores relations between temporal, portable architecture, the body and the environment. Her inflatable clothes, site-specific installations and public interventions have been exhibited and experienced nationally and internationally in Mexico, France, Belgium, Estonia, Scotland, Bulgaria, Germany and The Netherlands.

Recent solo exhibitions include Dressware and other inflatables at the Foreman Art Gallery at Bishop´s University, Canada (2006), A modern-day nomad who moves as she pleases at Plein Sud, Canada (2005) and Ice Dome Project on the Lachine Canal in Montréal (2005). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany, Musée d´art contemporain de Montréal, ISEA 2004 (Tallinn, Estonia), ALaPlage (Toulouse, France) and the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts (Montréal). Presently she is doing the Conseil des arts et des letters du Québec residency at the Tapiola Guest Studio in Espoo, Finland.