For several months, New York audiences will have the opportunity to see the latest films by visual artists from all over the world. The Sights and Sounds review was initiated by Jens Hoffman, director of the Jewish Museum in New York, who invited 25 curators from all over the world to cooperate, including Juan A. Gaitan from Columbia, Sarah Rifky from Egypt and Suzana Sousa from Angola.
For one month, each curator will present their own selection of films that were made within the last three years and refer to the problems of a given country or region. Poland is represented by Joanna Warsza, curator of the urban space activities at this year’s Manifesta 10 in Saint Petersburg.
The Sight and Sounds: Poland exhibition, on display for all of November, features works by Anna Baumgart and Karolina Breguła, as well as the Georgian Bouillon Group collective and the German artist Marion von Osten.
Its starting point was extraordinary conversations with artists in their studios (i.e., so-called studio talks), the narratives, extraordinary stories built by them, often poetic and political at the same time, and afterwards taking the form of film images – says Joanna Warsza to Culture.pl about her selection.
Anna Baumgart presents her film Conquerors of the Sun (2012), a story reminiscent of one of the “agitation trains” that departed from Russia towards Western Europe after the October Revolution of 1917. The trains, designed by Russian avant-garde artists, transported communist propaganda and contemporary works of art on-board. Baumgart’s film is a mockumentary about a train from Moscow to Berlin which gets lost in Poland due to unspecified circumstances. Karolina Breguła's contribution to the exhibition is her 2013 work The Offence. Warsza describes it as –
The Offence is the enigmatic story of a city stuck in a strange lethargy, which inclines its inhabitants towards various deviations. Some of the citizens grow clover upon their own skin. In response, officials impose severe penalties to suppress the practice. It’s not accidentally that the film refers to the current political situation in Hungary.
The Central European film review will also feature Religious Aerobics (2010–13), a work by the Bouillon Group which is an artistic response to the rise of religious fundamentalism in the Caucasus after the Soviet Union’s collapse, and No Voyage on the North Sea (2013) by Marion von Osten, in which the artist tells the story of the wreck of a Chinese ship in the Swedish port of Gothenburg.
All the films are presented in the Jewish Museum in New York in a specially arranged cinema and, after the project finishes, on the museum’s website.
Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video
The Jewish Museum, New York
8.11.2013-5.02.2016
Sights and Sounds: Poland
1-30.11.2014
Artists: Bouillon Group, Anna Baumgart, Karolina Breguła, Marion von Osten
Curator: Joanna Warsza
Source: Jewish Museum, curator's materials, ed. AS, transl. szm, November 2014