On Sunday, September 12th we would kindly like to invite you to the opening of the exhibition “Sweet Home Sweet: A Story of Survival, Memory, and Returns”.
The opening of the exhibition will take place at 18.00. At 19.00 we would like to invite you to a special concert dedicated to the exhibition, created and performed by Alex Roth.
Sunday, 12.09.2021, 19.00
Concert: “Unfinished…”
Conceived in response to the “Sweet Home Sweet” exhibition, “Unfinished…” brings together Detroit-born, London-raised and now Kraków-based guitarist Alex Roth with three of Poland’s most renowned experimental musicians: vocalist Olga Szwajgier, saxophonist Mikołaj Trzaska, and percussionist Qba Janicki. The quartet’s performance takes inspiration from John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “experimental albums” Unfinished Music Vol. 1–3. Ryszard Ores, the subject of the exhibition, had Vol. 1 in his diverse collection of vinyl records, which were inherited by subsequent generations of his family. The album is unusual for (among other things) featuring another record—a song written in the ’20s that became popular again in the ’40s—playing in the background throughout Side One, years before sampling had become common practice. In the context of the exhibition, the idea of responding to a record that quotes another record from a previous era is symbolic of how each generation’s stories are embedded in the next.
While the conceptual inspiration comes from Unfinished Music Vol. 1, the concert’s instrumentation parallels that of Vol. 2, a live recording on which Lennon (electric guitar) and Ono (vocals) were joined by saxophonist John Tchicai and percussionist John Stevens, both legends of improvised music. Tonight, Roth and his guest musicians will not be replicating the original Lennon/Ono recordings, but instead will draw on their spirit of spontaneity and experimentation to create new music weaving audio samples from the exhibition together through unbridled improvisation.
Alex Roth – electric guitar
Olga Szwajgier – vocals
Mikołaj Trzaska – saxophone
Qba Janicki – amplified percussion and electronics
Free admission.
Due to epidemiological restrictions, space is limited.