She studied in the Animation Film Studio of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts’ Graphics Faculty. In 2004, she defended (with distinction) her degree piece, comprising the film 1-39-C (2004) and the theoretical paper Audiowizualność (Audiovisuality), realised under Hieronim Neumann. She currently works as an assistant to Daniel Szczechura at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw, and to Hieronim Neumann, at her alma mater, where she also prepares her doctoral thesis. Moreover, Wroniewicz is a freelance graphic designer and cooperates with the Polish Television.
Olga Wroniewicz operates on the border of film and auro-musical projects, which is even demonstrated by the subject of her diploma thesis. As she declares, music has always been closer to her, which is why many of her films are pseudo-musical constructions, referencing the so-called Visual Music activities. Just like her idols: Oscar Fishinger, Hans Richter, or Man Ray, Wroniewicz edits non-representative forms into causal chains, which qualifies her films as abstract animation. The emotions – as it is hard to talk about meanings in the case of her films – emerge on the intersection of image and sound.
She also started her creative path with musical creations. In 2003, Wroniewicz realised a hypnotising, visually bold clip for Patti Smith’s song Land. Searching for new forms of communication, the author combined abstract, black and white graphics with manipulated, monochromatic dramatic footage, edited together at a manic pace and rhythm. Even though she translated the song’s theme into visuals almost literally, Land is exceptionally emotional and is often read in a sensual manner.
In the same year, during a scholarship at the Institute of Fine Arts Lahti of the Polytechnic in Finland, Wroniewicz used frames from that same music video in her explorations of the mutual influence of image and sound on the reception of an artwork. Her experiment consisted in re-editing the images, which were strongly linked to the previous piece and having the new visual material soundtracked by a person who was not familiar with the original affiliation of the pictures. This montage and sound deconstruction led to a creation of the film titled 00:03:04:08 (the duration of the video), which was incredibly uncanny and far from the original’s literalness. The combination of Baldvin Ringsted’s music with Wroniewicz’s dynamic montage of images generated an extremely sensual, non-verbal, moving message. Wroniewicz’s next animation tilted Styk (Point of Contact, 2003), also co-created with Ringsted, was much milder. One could even find in this film an outline of a plot, which is unusual for the director, but here acts only as an excuse to play with the viewer’s emotions. The title of the film is also very significant. On one hand, it can be interpreted literally, as short circuit, which in fact appears in the plot of the animation. It is however also worth looking at it in the broader context of Wroniewicz’s discourse and treat it as another example of investigating emotions that emerge on the titular intersection of image and sound.
A year later, she created Fuga (Fugue), a visualisation for the live performance of W.A. Mozart’s music by the Trensemble quintet at the Le Madame club in Warsaw. While creating the visual layer, Wroniewicz carefully followed the firm rules of fugue composition: in the initial frames, she introduced the theme comprising simple geometric figures, to then transform, transpose, and develop it.
Wroniewicz continued her audiovisual in the diploma film 1-39-C. She composed it out of simple, few-second long animated samples, which by themselves didn’t carry any emotional or semantic tinge. She gave an equivalent task to the composer Franciszek Kozłowski, who was to prepare a set of musical, meaningless samples. Next, they treated these animated and musical samples as notes and collaborated to create a score. The effect was a project acting as a game of aural and visual sounds, divided into three musically and visually different sections, referencing one another like a dejà vu.
In IO (2005), Wroniewicz reached out for a much more filmic structure, which, despite abstract imagery, becomes a visual tale. A special role in this film was played by the cinematography, created by Janusz Wojciechowski using a stop-frame method. The hypnotising, almost ten minute long animation transports the audience into the world of inanimate and organic objects, which upon a close inspection seem to have their own life rhythm, emphasised by Antoni Łazarkiewicz’s light and a trance-like music.
The artist (as a member of the Likwid team) realised a music video for Komety’s song Krzywe nogi (2004), which was nominated for the Yach Film Festival award in the category Other Energy. She also took part in the group exhibition at M25 in Warsaw, where she showed the drama film Przepraszam (I’m Sorry, 2006), realised in collaboration with Elżbieta Kaszuba. The film, evoking music video poetics, responded to the theme of the exhibition: Kobieta to nieudany mężczyzna (A Woman is a Failed Man).
Filmography
- 2003 – Land, 00:03:04:08, Styk
- 2004 – Fuga, 1-39-C
- 2005 – IO
Author: Mariusz Frukacz, November 2009, transl. AM, September 2016