Iwona Liegmann´s final exhibition took place in cooperation with Forum Kunst und Architektur (Forum Art and Architecture). 

An exhibition catalogue is available.

The scholarship holder - Iwona Liegmann

1993:	graduation at the faculty of fine arts of the university Mikolaja Kopernika in Toruń at the chair of Prof. Zygmunt Kotlarczyk
1995-96:	postgraduate studies at Gray´s School of Art in Aberdeen (scholarship awarded by the British Council) solo exhibitions in Toruń, Piła, Wrocław, Sandomierz, Legnica, Warszawa and Essen, took part in several group exhibitions
2005:	scholarship awards by the Polish Ministry of Culture as well as by the city of Toruń for the project „Mummy Mami“
2006:	scholarship granted by Stellwerk Zollverein e.V. in Essen dealing with the subject „Border-crossing experiences and identity enlargement of the European consciousness between East and West“

Artist´s homepage: http://free.art.pl/liegmann

The project - "Zwerge - Dwarves"

There is already a historical answer to the obvious question what a scholarship dealing with the issue „Border-crossing experiences and identity enlargement" focussing the eastward expansion of the EU actually has to do with garden dwarves. Well-informed dwarves collectors and enthusiasts are familiar to the assumption, that the serial fabrication of the first clay figures - apparently resembling to the "German Michel" - has begun between 1872 and 1890 in Graefenroda (Thuringia, Germany). Far less known should be indeed, that the present world center of gnome production is currently situated in the Polish city Nowa Sól. More than 300 firms are supposed to have manufactured there for the mid-1990ies predominantly for the German market. How passed-down attributions to national characters could have changed in view of this Polish-German cross-border trade - about this could arise a lot of speculations.

For six months the artist Iwona Liegmann, however not living in Nowa Sól but in Toruń, has kept the track of the garden dwarf, a German-Polish cultural asset, as we know now. But by no means was she too much interested in  treating the striking stereotypes. Detached from clichés, which could have easily unfolded between allotment gardens, disneyfication and Amélie-reminiscences, she wanted to approach the collective type of the jelly-bag-cap-wearers by means of individualisation. All the more because the dwarf donations and flea market finds accumulated in her studio during her artist-in-residence stay in Essen - the kind of material she wanted exclusively to work with - already suggested to have own stories by their age and visible evidences of use. So Liegmann instantly took a step forward in fictionalisation and foisted "hidden private lives" on them. In such a way she interpreted the cosmos of nanus hortorum vulgaris (the common garden dwarf) in well-established fairy tale tradition as a displaced allegory of human reality - and as a world apart or rather parallel to her own living and working surroundings.

From the site of Iwona Liegmann´s studio at Zollverein, shaft 4/5/11, emanated the initial constellation for an Essen dwarf saga tied up to the mythically prefigured association of the jelly-bag-cap-men with mining: Liegmann pretends that all the dwarves became redundant after the close-down of the pits at Zollverein in 1986. About how their life may have developped dwarf-compatibly, she is telling fabulous tales with the series of paintings, objects and related texts, which - framed by congenial music of teamforest - are subject of this exhibition.

The kitschy appearance, already expressed in the physiognomies of the clay and plastic figures, the artist facilely carries it to excess, just to take then a crosswise turn into the grotesque and surreal. In reminiscence of romanticism the dead object-world of industrial mass production abruptly seems to be animated inside of the artist´s studio - and thereby to make itself independent in a sometimes quite unsettling way.

Thus Liegmann´s artistic work perhaps can be compared to Urs Widmer´s novel "Ein Leben als Zwerg" ("Life as a Dwarf") from afar. However Liegmann tells a completely different story, namely a fairy tale about the Germans and their dwarves as a transboundary conception for perceptions of the self and the others. She is doing this with a lot of abysmal wit, but also with distinct sympathy. And this is not quite self-evident from the historical point of view.

teamforest - “they want to be called little people (music for an exhibition)”

Music, production and instruments by Philipp Bueckle

www.teamforest.de - www.myspace.com/teamforest

34 minutes, 6 segments

a. turn a happy little fella into a sad miner

b. precious collapsed lung

c. do their children grow out of the earth like trees?

d. indietronic sandman

e. powerful tiny fists

f. message of the dream man

Philipp Bueckle´s music, composed and arranged especially for Iwona Liegmann´s exhibition, is dealing with the contrast of the dwarf as a legendary figure and as a 'real person'.  By means of different techniques of sampling and mixing, a hybrid image of the dwarf between children´s song and mining sounds was created, providing multiple readings, just like the different musical stylistics being used. The easygoing cheerfulness of the Disney interpretation collides with  raw mining noises and talking blues of American pitmen. The sandman´s dream world is confronted with the bizarr alienations of David Lynch and the hard reality of mining work. The black lung is yodeling the dwarves march, reality overtakes the dream, which anytime can become a nightmare.

Primary sources for citations: Angelo Badalamenti – Twin Peaks soundtrack, Cex – Cex at arm’s length, Lee Dorsey – Working in a coalmine, Heinz Strunk – Trittschall im Kriechkeller, Adolf Winkelmann – Jede Menge Kohle (film), V.A. – Come all you coalminers, V.A. – Disney’s Schneewittchen (snow white) OST and findings from children´s songs, films, radio plays. 

With special thanks to:

	ALL IS THE NET

Galerie Frank Schlag and Koncern Energetyczny ENERGA SA (subsidiary in Toruń) for funding the exhibition catalogue, Olaf Eybe from Deutsch-Polnische Gesellschaft Essen e.V. (German-Polish Society Essen), Mara & Karl-Heinz Mauermann und Ulrich Bode & Dr. Veronika Grabe from Zeche Zollverein e.V. - Verein zur Foerderung der Geschichte des Bergwerks (Zeche Zollverein - Society for the Promotion of the History of the Mining Pit) for their personally engaged, active and helpful attendance to the project, the Deutsche Bergbau-Museum Bochum (German Mining-Museum Bochum), the Deutsche Steinkohle AG and the Ruhrlandmuseum Essen for providing mining-related sound material, the members, friends and sponsors of Stellwerk Zollverein e.V. and many others.

Contact for further information:

Phone:    +49 201/88 72 111
E-mail:    info@stellwerk-zollverein.de