SORROW CONQUERS HAPPINESS, KUŚMIROWSKI and BOGACKA, it means art at OFF Festival 2009.

Like every year, the music events, which are the main part of OFF Festival, are accompanied by projects connected with other kinds of art. Similarly to previous years, during OFF Festival 2009, between the 6th and 9th of August, in Mysłowice are going to appear outstanding representatives of plastic arts – painting and sculpture – as well as film art, their activities are going to refer in various ways to music. The festival audience is going to have an opportunity to see the incredible cinematic exhibition “SORROW CONQUERS HAPPINESS”, an extraordinary concert of Robert Kuśmirowski and a mural by Agata Bogacka that is still a surprise.

• "SORROW CONQUERS HAPPINESS" – CINEMATIC EXHIBITION

The title of the exhibition - "Sorrow Conquers Happiness" -  was taken from the film by Ragnar Kjartansson, and the authors of the works collected at it are Johanna Billing, Agnieszka Brzeżańska, Jesper Just, Joanna Rajkowska and Salla Tykkä.

The project placed in a music context is to some extent the continuation of last year`s exhibition Something Must Break, thought as a specific soundtrack located in different points of Mysłowice. The deserted storehouse standing at the Portowa Street in Mysłowice, will turn into the cinema spreading over the time… Everything based on the grindhouse cinemas from the 60’s and 70’s. Available for 24 hours a day looped audio-visual sets will focus on despair, failure, fatigue or melancholy – the sign of their existence possible to find in the modern video arts and their various connections with music. In a specific, paradoxical way the warehouse will become a chill out space for the festival audience.

• CONCERT

ROBERT KUŚMIROWSKI (1973)  studied in the Institute of Fine Arts of Maria Curie – Skłodowska Univeristy in Lublin. He is called a “genius of dummy” and “manipulator of the reality”. He bases majority of his works on reconstruction and perverse copying of an old things. During this year’s OFF Festival edition that outstanding sculptor will surprisingly take part in a music project with the band in storehouse by the Portowa Street.

• MURAL

AGATA BOGACKA (1976) graduated the Faculty of Graphic Arts in The Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw – she belongs to the group of the most important artists of youth generation, graphic designer, photographer and the first of all a painter, the author of one of the most expressive and genuine visions of intimate life in modern Polish art. The artist will create a mural somewhere in the civic space of Mysłowice.

It is going to be third such artistic interference of that kind in a public space initiated within OFF Festival in order to embellish permanently and improve another fragment of it. In 2007, on Artur Rojek`s request, the project of an enormous mural at the size of 170 m2 was created on a pre-war tenement house by an outstanding painter Edward Dwurnik. His “Uśmiechnięte twarze” (“ Smiling faces”) painted by the students of Fine Arts Academy in Katowice is not only a permanent trace of the next edition of OFF Festival, but also an example of this that by simple means, using art, the grey reality of the city can be colored. A year ago, one of the most appreciated in the world, contemporary Polish painters, Wilhelm Sasnal designer the graphic composition made of two first letters of the name of the city – the Word „MY” („WE”) made of half dry and half blossoming branches, referring to the coal mining reality which is close both to the city inhabitants and to all of US in more universal dimension. Sasnal`s project, made by the students of Fine Arts Academy and the volunteers, has buried itself permanently in the city.