Fabric from voices, by Marina de Vries
Marijke de Goey has taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam for 22 years. She still likes to talk to young artists about their common profession.
Anna Orlikowska had already started a career in Poland in the world of theater and dance. There she regularly collaborated with singers and became fascinated by the human voice. “When two people sing together, I saw in my imagination that they are connected by a thread,” says the artist. Because she wanted to look beyond the boundaries of theater and dance and beyond the traditional art academies in Poland, she came to the Netherlands in 2013 to study sound and imagination, sound and imagination at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. One of her first works there is called “The Weaving”, in which six walking singers are connected with their voices as with imaginary threads, which together form a fabric.
Her work is usually made especially for the space in which the sound piece or performance is performed. You have to be there to experience the fragile, immaterial work. De Goey saw her work for the first time a year and a half ago at the Art Rottterdam art fair. There the video installation / performance Shapes (2018) was shown at the survey of young talent call Prospects & Concepts. Dancers translate descriptions of various artworks of art into movement. In another work, Performing The Score (2017), Orlikowska relied on FBI documents about theater maker Bertolt Brecht who fled to America in 1933. An artist friend translated the text into a graphic score, which Orlikowska in turn had translated into sound and movement. De Goey: “What she does is and is not very different from what I do. Because if you consider me a sculptor, she sculpts with sound, bodies and movement. I don’t always understand it, but I find it very intriguing. In addition, De Goey admires her attitude as an artist. Orlikowska travels all over the world, from an artist’s residency to a residency, from Chicago to Wuppertal. Her future? She wants to continue experimenting and to grow steadily as an artist.
<<curriculum>>
Anna Orlikowska already had a career in theater and dance in Poland when she decided to specialize in the combination of “sound and image” at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She later received her Master at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since then, she has received scholarships and prizes as a “young talent.” With Amsterdam as a base, she made tailor-made work in Chicago, New York, Wuppertal, Warsaw and Rotterdam. Now she wants to get a foothold in the Netherlands and exhibit more often.
