→ DISPUTAZIUNS
SUSCH
Tapta: Flexible Forms
Online Symposium
5 October 2024, 10:00 am (CET)
Admission free upon registration
Tapta (pseudonym of Maria Wierusz-Kowalska, 1926-1997) stands out as a significant and innovative artist who has profoundly impacted the Belgian and international art scenes since the 1960s. Her sculptures question traditional ways of using textiles and elevate the material to a new dimension in visual arts, transcending the purely decorative. Tapta called her works sculpture souple (flexible sculpture), reflecting her ongoing effort to expand the concept of sculpture to include the fluidity, tension of threads and interaction with the viewer.
Born in 1926 in Poland, Tapta arrived in Belgium as a political refugee with her husband, after taking part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. She studied weaving at the La Cambre National School of Visual Arts, Brussels. Shortly afterwards, she moved to the Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), where they lived from 1950 to 1960. On her return to Belgium, until her sudden death in 1997, she worked in Brussels as an artist and – from 1976 until 1990 – as a professor at La Cambre.
In the 1970s Tapta created a number of large ‘environments,’ such as Tent for Chatting (Tente à causer) and Forms for a Flexible Space (Formes pour un espace souple) which became three-dimensional and increasingly interacted with the space and the viewer. ‘I do not believe a work of art should only be viewed. My work calls for touching and daily use’ – she claimed. By the middle of the 1980s, Tapta began to use such synthetic materials as neoprene and rubber in her search for new media that could be flexible and rigid at the same time.
Exhibition Tapta: Flexible Forms at Muzeum Susch curated by Liesbeth Decan is the first major retrospective of the artist outside of Belgium providing a comprehensive overview of her artistic career and a thought-provoking narrative highlighting her original contribution to the development of post-war art.
The one-day symposium devoted to the work of Tapta, organised as part of the exhibition, and accompanying the artist’s monograph, aims to enhance the international reception of the artist’s oeuvre and present it within a broader context open to new enriching interpretations.
For more information about the monograph book here
The symposium will be held in English.
Admission free upon registration
Web-stream will start 5 October 2024, 10 am (CET)
The symposium will be recorded and available to watch online.
PROGRAMME
10:00 AM
Introduction:
Agnieszka Sosnowska
Curator of Disputaziuns Susch
Liesbeth Decan
Curator of Tapta: Flexible Forms exhibition
Part I
10:10
Tapta: Life in Images
Greet Billet and Camiel van Winkel
10:25
Supple Sculptures, Open Mind: On Tapta’s Multifaceted Art Practice
11:00
Sculpting Feelings: Tapta and the Textile Art of the 1970s
11:30
Turning Points: Tapta in the International Biennial of Tapestry in Lausanne
12:00
Panel discussion: From Wallbound to Spatial: Tapta’s Textile Art in an International Context
Participants: Greet Billet, Ann Coxon, Ann Veronica Janssens, Marta Kowalewska
Moderator: Liesbeth Decan
13:00-14:30
lunch break
Part II
14:30
Weaving Environments
15:00
Tapta: Textile Integrations in Space
15:20
Panel discussion: Entering the Sculpture: Tapta’s Flexible Spaces
Participants: Sérgio B. Martins, Dirk Snauwaert, Joanna Zielińska
Moderator: Agnieszka Sosnowska
16:30
Online guided tour: Tapta: Flexible Forms
Partners of the symposium:
