GRZEGORZ KARNAS ANGLO-POLISH QUARTET @ JAZZ CAFE POSK

Saturday 11 July, 8.30pm, £5 

Jazz Cafe POSK

238-246 King Street, London W6 0RF   

Tube: Ravenscourt Park – District Line 

Polish vocal star Grzegorz Karnas is set to make his mark on the London Jazz Scene with an exciting Anglo-Polish project.  Like a more quirky, subversive Kurt Elling, Karnas combines a truly beautiful and intriguing palette of vocal sounds.  From scat to syllabics to stutters, his great musicality and mesmerising stage-craft bang a nail in the coffin of the jazz-lite male crooner so in vogue today. He has collaborated with the emerging artists of his country’s jazz scene as well as its legends. He initially studied classical guitar and then graduated at the prestigious Jazz Institute of the Academy of Music in Katowice. In 1998, he was awarded first prize at the International Jazz Vocalists’ Meeting in Zamosc and released his debut album Reinkarnasja in 2000.  Karnas self-produced the follow-up album in 2004, a solo project entitled Sny-Dreams of a Ninth Floor and in 2006 released Ballads for the End of the World featuring cellist Adam Oles.  He has toured major venues and festivals in Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany and Romania. In 2006 he was awarded first prize at the Brussels International Young Jazz Singers’ Competition followed by a win at the 2007 Crest Jazz Vocal Competition in  France. He is now the artistic director of Voicingers - the International Jazz Competition For Singing Musicians in Poland.

This specially formed Anglo-Polish group combines rising star of the Polish scene pianist Michal Tokaj with stalwarts of the UK scene: bassist Julie Walkington and drummer Dave Ohm.  Expect energy-filled, groove-laden, acoustic music-making with a hefty dose of improvisation on jazz standards and beyond.

HOT D’JAZZ TRIO
25TH BIRMINGHAM INTERNATIONAL JAZZ FESTIVAL
3-5 July 

A leading gypsy swing group from Poland is set to make their UK debut feature in the 25th Birmingham International Jazz Festival from 3rd to 5th July (the festival runs from July 3 to 12)

The Hot D’Jazz Trio from Cracow, Poland, was formed thanks to the creative vision of guitarists Jacek Serczyk and Tomasz Kobiela to play music inspired by Django Reinhardt’s brand of gypsy swing. The trio, completed by bassist Michael Rapka, has had the honour of playing with such well-known artists as Annie Hilsberg, Robert Matt, Nigel Kennedy, Marek Sosnicki and Ronald Anderssen. The Hot D’Jazz Trio plays many festivals, is regularly to be heard at the Coltrane Music Bar in Cracow and, in December, features in a prestigious Concert for the UN in Vienna.

The Hot D’jazz Trio of Cracow will play at the venues below and their performances are free to the public during the festival.  

Friday 3rd July
15:00 - Waters Edge Bandstand   
21:00 - Lord Clifden   

Saturday 4th July   
13:00 - Round Room, Museum & Art Gallery   
19:30 - Garden House   

Sunday 5th July   
13:00   Hotel du Vin   
19:30   Bar Risa  

For more information about The Hot D’jazz Trio of Cracow playing at the jazz festival, please visit the Birmingham International Jazz Festival’s website or call the Jazz Hotline: 0121 454 7020.

CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION 1989-2009

You won’t fool the Children of the Revolution.
(Marc Bolan, 1972)

Revolution is like Saturn: she devours her own children.
(Georg Büchner, 1835)


Over the course of 1989, from June to November, and on into 1990, the cold-war status quo was radically brought to an end by a series of revolutions and political transformations that swept across Central and Eastern Europe. From the shipyards of Gdańsk, via Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate and Prague’s Wenceslaus Square, to the boulevards of Bucharest, the ‘people’s democracies’ of the region were brought face to face with the democratic will of their own people on their own city streets and squares. Children of the Revolution 1989 - 2009 is a series of events taking place this year London, twenty years on. Through these events we invite you to join us in examining these revolutionary happenings and the legacy that they have left to their children. In public discussions that will range from philosophical speculation on the idea of revolution to careful analysis of what made the changes of 1989 possible and a reconstruction of the visual landscape of the experience of those changes, we shall be looking back into the past to ask a question that points into the future: Have the children of the revolution been devoured, or do they remain unfooled, ready to change the world once more?

Children of the Revolution 1989-2009 is a series of events celebrating the 20th anniversary of the 1989 democratic transformation in Europe:

SOLIDARITY/solidarities
International conference at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 5-6 June 2009

Designing Democracy: Posters and the Political Transformation of Europe 1989-1991
Research project at the Poster Collection, the Victoria & Albert Museum, June-November 2009

Revolution we love you
Public debate at Tate Modern, 21 November 2009

Children of the Revolution 1989-2009 was initiated and is co-ordinated by the Polish Cultural Institute in London, and organised by the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Tate Modern, and Victoria & Albert Museum in collaboration with EUNIC London (Embassy of the Republic of Bulgaria London, Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia in London, Czech Centre London, Estonian Embassy in London, Goethe-Institut London, Hungarian Cultural Centre in London, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania and Lithuanian Embassy in the UK, Polish Cultural Institute in London, Romanian Cultural Institute in London). Children of the Revolution 1989-2009 is supported by the European Commission Representation in London and M.B. Grabowski Fund, and is part of POLSKA! YEAR.

Project coordinator
Magda Raczynska
magda.raczynska@polishculture.org.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 207 440 0246

For more information visit also: http://www.europe.org.uk/1989 

DESIGNING DEMOCRACY: POSTERS AND THE POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE 1989-1991

As part of the Children of the Revolution 1989-2009 series, over 250 posters from the Victoria and Albert Museum relating to democratic change in Europe are now available on the V&A website.

Cataloguing the Collection

Cataloguing the posters is a work in progress. The online catalogue records currently include images and core information about each poster.

The V&A is now collaborating with an international team of curators and art historians to research the collection in further detail and generate contextual information about the posters.  We will be considering how the posters intersected with events and debates and what they reveal of people’s political imagination and experience. What design strategies and styles developed to describe a transformed political landscape and what impact did the posters have on the visual environment of 1989? How were the posters printed, disseminated and displayed? We are also interested in how these designs have been remembered and what responses they arouse twenty years after they were created and collected.

For more information contact Catherine Flood, Prints Curator, Word & Image Department, Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, London SW7 2RL, c.flood@vam.ac.uk

Digitisation of the posters has been supported by the the European Commission Representation in the UK. The cataloguing project is supported by EUNIC London.The reseach team includes Katalin Bakos (Curator, Hungarian National Gallery), David Crowley (Royal College of Art), Catherine Flood (Curator, Victoria and Albert Museum), Juozas Galkus (former Professor, Graphic Department, Vilnius Academy of Arts), René Grohnert (Director of the Deutsches Plakat Museum [German Poster Museum] Essen), Tõnis Liibek (Research Director of the Estonian History Museum), Alina Serban (independent curator and PhD student at the Courtauld Institute of Art), Marta Sylvestrová (Curator, Moravian Gallery in Brno), Agata Szydÿowska (Poster Museum at Wilanow).

The original posters can be viewed on request at the V&A in the Prints and Drawings Study Room.

Children of the Revolution 1989-2009 was initiated and is co-ordinated by the Polish Cultural Institute in London, and organised by the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Tate Modern, and Victoria & Albert Museum in collaboration with EUNIC London (Embassy of the Republic of Bulgaria London, Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia in London, Czech Centre London, Estonian Embassy in London, Goethe-Institut London, Hungarian Cultural Centre in London, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania and Lithuanian Embassy in the UK, Polish Cultural Institute in London, Romanian Cultural Institute in London). Children of the Revolution 1989-2009 is supported by the European Commission Representation in London and M.B. Grabowski Fund, and is part of POLSKA! YEAR.

SWAVA HARASYMOWICZ - PEN PAPER SCISSORS
V&A Friday Late
Friday 26 June 2009, 18.00-22.00
Victoria & Albert Museum, Prints Room 

Krakow born and London based artist Swava Harasymowicz got a double win at this year’s Victoria and Albert Museum Illustration Awards winning for her work for the Guardian Weekend magazine and a Penguin Books book cover.

Swava’s presentation at the V&A Friday Late on 26th June will be a talk through a set of photographs of Krakow, selected from Swava’s ongoing project - part personal notebook and part documentary.

The Joseph Conrad Society’s 2009 Annual International Conference, its 35th, will be held on 2-4 July at two venues in London. The third Philip J. Conrad Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Andrea White. As is traditional, the winner of the Juliet McLauchlan Essay Prize will be announced at the vin d’honneur held during the conference.

Program

The program of the conference is available at The Joseph Conrad Society’s webpage.

Ernest Read Symphony Orchestra (ERSO)
Sunday 28 June 2009, 6.30pm, St Johns Waterloo  

Andrzej Panufnik: Concerto Festivo
Walton: Symphony No 1

Conductor: Peter Stark

Ernest Read Symphony Orchestra was formed in 1931 by organist and education visionary, Ernest Read. The Orchestra tackles a range of ambitious repertoire to an impressive standard, giving five concerts a year in  venues across London under the baton of Peter Stark. The Orchestra champions developmental opportunities for emerging conductors and performers and remains committed to giving concerts for children.

Tickets: £10; £8 concessions. Tickets are available in advance by calling 07880 617869 or can be bought on the door.

For his third show at Sadie Coles HQ, Wilhelm Sasnal is showing a series of new paintings and a 16mm film.

Two main themes emerge from this new body of work, those of food sovereignty and earthly idylls. Paintings of coffee mounds, unmarked barrels, brightly coloured tubs, and a hazy Cuban road: all speak of trade, transportation and global agricultural networks. The politics of food are seen not in the narrow sense of consumerism, but rather as part of an urgent study of globalization and currencies of exchange in the modern capitalist era.

Wilhelm Sasnal

Wilhelm Sasnal was born in 1972 in Tarnow, Poland. He has had solo shows throughout Europe and the USA including Wilhelm Sasnal – Years of Struggle, Zacheta Narodowa Sztuki, Warsaw, 2008; Matrix, The Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California, 2005; and Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland, 2003.  His work has been part of group shows including The Painting of Modern Life, Hayward Gallery, London, 2007, and Airs de Paris, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2007.  He was included in the XXVI Bienal de Sao Paolo, 2004, and was short listed, with four other finalists, for the 2004 Vincent Prize at the Stedelijk Museum, 2004. A monograph, Wilhelm Sasnal: Paintings and Films was published by Veenman Publishers, 2006. Sasnal lives and works in Tarnow, Poland. Between 5 September 2009 and 10 January 2010, K21 in Düsseldorf, Germany, hosts a survey of Wilhelm Sasnal’s last seven years of work. 

“Chocolate” by Michał Olszewski, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in The Guardian

Michał Olszewski was born in 1977 in Ełk. He graduated in Polish philology from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He now works for Poland’s leading daily newspaper, “Gazeta Wyborcza”, in Kraków and writes articles on literary criticism and book reviews. ”Chocolate” is taken from To Amsterdam, a collection of stories by Michał Olszewski. Published in 2003, To Amsterdam is Olszewski’s first book, featuring the lives and experiences of Poles of the 20-30 year-old generation as they try to cope with life in post-communist Poland, but also in the cities of western Europe, where so many young Poles have gone in search of the economic advantages that are missing at home. 

Antonia Lloyd-Jones was born in 1962, and read Russian and Ancient Greek at Oxford. Her published translations from Polish include novels by Paweł Huelle and Olga Tokarczuk, short stories by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, and non-fiction, most recently by Ryszard Kapuściński and Wojciech Tochman. This year she received the Found in Translation Award for the best translation of Polish literature into English.