Paulina Olowska: The Mother | BMW Tate Live

Artist Paulina Olowska presents a site-specific theatre performance within Tate Modern’s collection displays. ‘The Mother An Unsavoury Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue’ is an adaptation of avant-garde playwright Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s play from 1924.

The story takes place in a bourgeois setting in which hallucinations, schizophrenia, alcoholism, madness and drug addiction turn into surrealist mayhem. Two professional actors play the role of the mother and the son, while Olowska’s friends and collaborators take on characters including the maid, the prostitute, the aristocratic party boy and the suspicious individual.

Olowska transformed a room in the Poetry and Dream collection display into the theatre set which was open during the day as an installation. The room became a domestic interior inhabited by works by artists including Meredith Frampton, Dora Carrington and Henri Matisse and shows Olowska’s continued interest in the appropriation of histories and the function of painting as a fictional space.

This performance took place at Tate Modern on Monday 21 September, Wednesday 23 September and Friday 25 September 2015 as part of the series BMW Tate Live 2015.
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