Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko – a duo of Polish audiovisual artists living and working in Warsaw. Jacek Doroszenko received a Master of Arts degree at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, and Ewa Doroszenko earned a Doctor of Fine Arts degree at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Focusing mainly on the intersection of visual and sound arts, the Doroszenko duo uses digital manipulations combined with traditional media. Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko create in a wide range of media, often using videos, sound and graphic installations, field recordings and musical scores, depending on the context. The artists are beneficiaries of many residency programmes, including Pragovka Gallery in Prague (Czech Republic 2023), Petrohradska Kolektiv in Prague (Czech Republic 2018), Klaipeda Culture Communication Center (Lithuania 2017), Atelierhaus Salzamt in Linz (Austria 2016), The Island-resignified in Lefkada (Greece 2015), Kunstnarhuset Messen in Ålvik (Norway 2015), AAVC Hangar in Barcelona (Spain 2014), Fondazione Del Bianco in Florence (Italy 2006).
Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko’s works have been exhibited in many galleries and contemporary art centres, including the Witold Lutosławski National Forum of Music in Wroclaw, the Polish Institute in Düsseldorf, Centre for Contemporary Art in Toruń, Cidade das Artes in Rio de Janeiro, Pragovka Gallery in Prague, Propaganda Gallery in Warsaw, Goldcorp Centre for the Arts in Vancouver, Fait Gallery in Brno, Exgirlfriend Gallery in Berlin, Casoria Contemporary Art Museum in Naples, Starak Family Foundation in Warsaw, Foto Forum in Bolzano, Wrocław Contemporary Museum, FIESP Cultural Center Ruth Cardoso in Sao Paulo. Duo Doroszenko participated in the Mediations Biennale in Warsaw, The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale in Rio de Janeiro, CoCArt Music Festival in Toruń, Transmission Arts Festival in Athens, Generate! Festival for Electronic Arts in Tübingen, Open Source Art Festival in Sopot, ISEA International Symposium on Electronic Art in Vancouver, Athens Digital Arts Festival, SURVIVAL in Wrocław, Future Places Festival in Porto, FILE Electronic Language International Festival in Sao Paulo, European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück, R>>EJECT Radicals Festival in Rotterdam. Jacek Doroszenko’s musical compositions have been released as internationally acclaimed albums – ‘Infinite Values’, Time Released Sound in the USA; ‘Wide Grey’, Eilean Records in France; ‘Soundreaming’ and ‘Bodyfulness’, Audiobulb Records in the UK.
The Witold Lutosławski National Forum of Music in Wroclaw. Unstable Oscillations – exhibition
Accompanying exhibition 11th International Musica Electronica Nova Festival, Wroclaw, 2023. Organiser: The Witold Lutosławski National Forum of Music.
Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko’s audiovisual project consists of video works, large-format graphic installations and a sound installation. The visual form of the works presented results directly from the sound sphere. Revealing the acoustic space of reality, the duo experiments with new technologies, relevant to the modern digital age. The graphic installations illustrate the path that sound material travels in the process of music production, especially electronic music: recording, reproduction, deconstruction, frequency cutting, working with the spectrum, compression, looping and distortion.
Festival curator: Pierre Jodlowski
Coordination: Małgorzata Klajn
More information at www.nfm.wroclaw.pl
Pragovka Gallery. Overlooked Horizons – exhibition
Pragovka Gallery, Prague, 2023
The audio-visual exhibition Overlooked Horizons features recent works by the Doroszenko duo exploring the relationship between the observer and the natural landscape. The works presented during the exhibition are based on the artists’ insights from numerous real and virtual journeys. Just as in the late 18th century people travelled in search of genius loci places, sights and moods that transported them to another time and allowed them to distance themselves from everyday life, today the Doroszenko duo discovers landscapes with unique qualities by taking artistic journeys online and offline.
Photos: Marcel Rozhoň © Pragovka Gallery
BWA Gallery in Bydgoszcz. Acoustic Gestures – exhibition
The exhibition is part of the Fonomo Music & Film Festival, Bydgoszcz, 2023.
„Following in the footsteps of the avant-gardists, Ewa Doroszenko and Jacek Doroszenko intuitively let themselves be led by art into its various nooks and crannies, thus experiencing new, sometimes undiscovered stimuli for themselves. (…) We are talking about attempts to integrate the arts, but also – and probably above all – to transcend the determinant of the instrument, the performance possibilities of the musical instrument in the classical sense, of which the performative actions of Charlotte Moormann or John Cage, but also the musical activities of artists such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and, in our backyard, Włodzimierz Kotoński, Krzysztof Penderecki, Andrzej Dobrowolski, Bogusław Schaeffer and Eugeniusz Rudnik with the Polish Radio Experimental Studio and the so-called „sonorism” at the forefront. ” Kama Wróbel
More information at www.galeriabwa.bydgoszcz.pl/en
Wroclaw Contemporary Museum. Metascore of new gestures – exhibition
Sound and graphic installations, video works, 2022
The exhibition entitled Metascore of New Gestures is a review of joint artistic experiments carried out by Jacek Doroszenko and Ewa Doroszenko in 2016–2022. Wrocław Contemporary Museum presents sound installations, video works and a series of graphics on paper. The duo’s creative work stems from their fascination with the relations between sound, space and visuality. In this triad, acoustic phenomena constitute the basis for artistic work, but the space that determines the entire process is equally important, providing the activities with a performative aspect.
More information at https://muzeumwspolczesne.pl
Propaganda Gallery. How to travel – exhibition
Series of photographic prints, photographic objects, and sound installations, Warsaw, 2019
The exhibition of Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko is a real untruth or an untrue reality. Through multiplied transformations of elements taken out from the real and virtual worlds, they created a piece of tangible evidence that today’s life, consciousness, and subjectivity extend far beyond our senses and travel through the areas of the medialized digital world. “How to travel” is an exhibition narrative composed of works that elude simple categorization and take a debate with the medium in which they were created. Fascinated by modern information technologies and their incredible potential to shape lifestyles, based on images from popular computer games and tourist guides, the artists explore the formal possibilities of digital blurs, distortions, and imperfections.
More info at www.artmirror.org
Fait Gallery. Exercises of listening – exhibition
Photographic prints, graphic and sound installations, Brno, 2016
In the exhibition at Fait Gallery in Brno, Polish art duo Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko get to grips with this relationship with sound. The duo investigate our propensity to favour the tangible over the audible in an immersive installation and body of work. Jacek Doroszenko creates the sounds, and Ewa Doroszenko responds to them through visual language; graphic prints that crackle with intensity and discord illustrating audio, visualising an audible flow that may or may not be ignored by visitors to the exhibition. Where folk oft attribute a sound to the physical object that has created it, the duo turns that inclination on its head; the sounds are indeterminable, and the visuals lead the narrative. Confusing, and contradictory, Doroszenko and Doroszenko’s work plays on our uncomfortable relationship with the unknown.
More info at www.we-heart.com
Metascore of new gestures
Dual 4K video | 11:34 | double stereo | 2020
The film is based on a static arrangement of elements of film set design, which simultaneously act as sound triggers, juxtaposed with a graphic representation of a synthetic music score. These objects perform a four-voice composition, which is intended to emphasize the loose time relationships between the objects. For each of them, time elapses at a slightly different rate, similarly to the particular parts of Witold Lutosławski’s ‘Jeux Vénitiens’. Aleatoric structure of the composition allows for the independent expression of individual elements of the applied arrangement.
Polish Institute Düsseldorf. Parallele Schwingungen – exhibition
Sound and graphic installations, video works, and a series of graphics on paper, Düsseldorf, 2023
Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko’s audio-visual exhibition consists of films, prints and installations. The Doroszenko duo use traditional tools and experimental digital techniques to reveal the sonic essence of the reality around us. Several delineated tropes help understand the artists’ intentions – I think the keywords here are digital reality, score, determinism, language, sound, data, sign or relativism and distortion of the message. Following in the footsteps of the avant-gardists, Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko intuitively let themselves be led by art into its various nooks and crannies, thus experiencing new, sometimes yet undiscovered stimuli. Jacek Doroszenko searches in the auditory space, often analysing the categories of relativism and determinism, and Ewa searches in the visual, graphic sphere, where the starting point is sound and the progressing digitalisation of reality.
More information at https://instytutpolski.pl
Soundreaming
photographic prints, graphic and sound installations, 2016
“Soundreaming” is an audio-visual art project from the artists, Ewa Doroszenko and Jacek Doroszenko. It is a digital audio-visual archive which uses the environment as the principal inspiration for the project. Inspired by location, experience and memory and motivated by the inversion of the traditional roles of photography and sound in the media and art worlds, “Soundreaming” emphasizes the importance of the acoustic environment on our memory and perception of place. Soundscapes replace photography as the dominant documentary element at the core of the artistic practice. The visual representation is directly inspired by the audio documentation of the locations featured in the archive. Moreover, this technique allows for the transparency of environmental sound to shape the audience’s perception of the artwork and in turn, allows the visual component of the composition more freedom to express itself.
More information at https://soundreaming.org
It is hard to find a polyphonic body
4K transferred to full HD video | 07:45 | stereo | color | 2016. The video has been produced in the framework of the Artist-in-Residence program at Kunstnarhuset Messen in Ålvik, Norway.
The video consists of scenes of the majestic Norwegian landscape, in which the moving figure delivers luminous markers and determines the pitch on the scale of each frame, from higher to lower. Each marker causes a different pitch of sound. These consonances reveal a specific approach in which the nature and articulation of certain basic elements of a composed work are left to the performer himself. In the lower part of the frame, there are screen records, captured in Max/MSP, a creative software environment. Virtual instruments are constantly generating music notated in the landscapes above.
The same horizon repeated at every moment of the walk
Full HD video | 02:05 | stereo | color | 2014. The project has been produced in a framework of the Artist-in-Residence program at Fundació AAVC Hangar in Barcelona, Spain, in 2014.
Throughout history, there were lots of concepts of movement, from body language through various kinds of dance to floating above the ground like levitation. But, in fact, the movement itself is a simple feature and its basic purpose of it is to get from one point to another. All the other concepts are just cultural and intellectual associations. Building on this simple principle, all we can do is treat the body as the driving force for a simple starting point. The body can move it and thereby the point can be displaced to other locations. In this case, the point is a unique conveyor – it carries sound.
The video is based on the pitch phenomena, a perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale. Composition is made of four frames, in which the moving figure’s head determines the pitch on the scale of each frame, from higher to lower. This aleatoric quartet reveals a specific approach, where some primary elements of a composed work’s realization are left to the determination of its performer.
More information at https://www.clotmag.com
Residents, Warsaw Gallery Weekend – exhibition
A site-specific exhibition created at Propaganda / PRPGND Gallery as part of Warsaw Gallery Weekend 2017
The exhibition of works by Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko at the Propaganda Gallery is the effect of a certain coincidence related to an experiment carried out in this space as part of an international residency project. The exhibition is made up of works created in Spain, Norway, Lithuania, and Warsaw, in the months leading up to Warsaw Gallery Weekend. For Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko, a well-fitted studio isn’t a privileged place of creative work or a point-of-reference. The idea of a fictional studio often brings to mind the idea of the „mental atelier”. They take on the roles of travellers, taking on temporary spaces, along with the residents of the spaces that have been entrusted to them. Ewa and Jacek Doroszenko attempt to delve deeper into these spaces – to change and rearrange them according to their vision. The project put together for Warsaw Gallery Weekend explores the relationship between the visual and audio spheres.
Bodyfulness
Album release + singles, includes an extended photographic project, Audiobulb Records, UK | 2022
We are a creative couple. In our symbiotic everyday reality, art blends with life. We operate in the era of digital dependencies. Contemporary technologies increasingly affect our lives and work, and the dynamics of their development make them more and more integrated with reality. Our situation seems to be dominated by virtual images and content – digital immersion is an inseparable element of every day we spend together. There is no longer a dichotomy between the virtual and real worlds, we exist in a new, hybrid space in which boundaries extend beyond the tangible experience. Fascinated by these phenomena, in the “Bodyfulness” project we try to capture the coexistence of physical and virtual life, talk about the intimate experience of the body online and offline, and show a subjective audiovisual study of the way modern technology and culture change our intimate relationships.
Performed by Jacek Doroszenko: various electronics, prepared piano, field recordings, sound installation recordings, various analogue synths, bells, various strings & Ewa Doroszenko: skin and body parts, synthetic pellets. Recorded at The Quality Studio and the artist’s studio in Warsaw, additional sounds recorded in a frame of the Artist-in-Residence at Salzamt, Linz, Austria
More information at https://www.neo2.com
