Wojciech Puś

Wojciech Puś is a filmmaker, lighting designer, set designer, and visual artist who creates light installations, video works, and interactive objects. He was born in 1978.

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Wojciech Puś, photo: courtesy of the artist

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Wojciech Puś is a graduate of and assistant professor at the Photography & TV Production Department of the Łódź Film School (diploma – 2004, PhD – 2013), and a grantee of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. From 2005 to 2013 he was the assistant of Józef Robakowski in the multimedia department at Łódź Film School.

Puś is an artist engaged in various fields of art: film, theatre, visual arts, and opera. In his works he combines the aesthetics of experimental film with elements of light and video installations, giving them a cinematographic character. He has created an original, recognisable style, largely referring to rhythm, movement, and time, analysed by the artist using the medium of film. Puś confronts the viewer with abstract representations having narrative potential, constructed with the use of montage and music. His works are on the verge of two realities – the actual one, and the one created by the film’s visuality. Puś works mainly with light and cinematographic means of expression. His realisations mostly assume the character of space installations in which the artist uses motion picture, light and soundtracks (often in the form of vinyl).

Light … is the basic matter I work in. Matter that I either transform or wait for it to transform itself into a dimension (aesthetic or symbolic) that interests me. With the help of light, I start to get into the mood and meaning of an image, be it in film, theatre, or installation.

Puś treats light as an autonomous medium in theatre. His works using light and video projections create mental spaces exhibiting poetic potential.

In theatre, Puś uses the medium of video in two ways, first of them being live video, like in the staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Polski Theatre in Wrocław, and the second – using video as a source of light, as was the case in Lincz (Lynching, trans. NS) by Agnieszka Olsten.

In 2006, Puś created the installation Garden, in which he uses light and video. At first the piece was used to modify theatrical space and served as part of scenography. The director of the Wrocław-based gallery Entropia, Mariusz Jodko, saw the installation and decided to put forward the proposal of doing an exhibition of Puś’s work. This event marks the artist’s entrance into the field of visual arts. As he commented on it:

It was actually because of how hermetically various media are perceived in theatre and how little interconnected they are that I decided to make my own projects that wouldn’t work in theatre. Co-operation with galleries and museums made me realise quite a banal thing, actually: it is the space of galleries that allows for true experimentation with media.

In 2008, Puś realised the video piece Instant, comprised of sequences of videos recorded during the several years preceding. The clips registered singular, elusive events. The film is almost an hour long and is accompanied by a collection of polaroids with the same title. As the artist said:

In the years between 2005 and 2008 I took my video camera with me everywhere, it was a perfect tool for creating a video-diary, documenting intimate situations, video-portraits, everyday events, natural phenomena. I was also fascinated the medium itself, its aesthetics, visual potential, the matter of digital images. The narration of succesive sequences in Instant allows the viewer direct contact with an intimate image of my everyday life, further strengthened by the polaroids accompanying the film. In the end, the film is a collage of liquid realities, emotional states, and interwoven, complementary portraits, selected from my private video archive.

In the work Given Puś took up the widely-commented case of the disappearance of the four-year old British girl, Madeleine McCann, in the Portuguese town Praia de Luz. He was interested in the phenomenon of a celebrity-in-making, a completely unknown person becoming famous due to her sudden disappearance. Given is also a story about film as a medium, about the potential of light in constructing narration. In this case, the narration conjoins the characteristics of hard-boiled fiction and the proliferation of new and new threads, multiplying ‘data’, various versions of events, speculations and suppositions, which ceaselessly go in circles without hope for ever explaining the narrated story. The installation Paparazzi was also part of Given. It was exhibited in 2013 in the display window of a Louis Vuitton boutique in Vitkac, a store selling luxurious goods in Warsaw. It was an installation built of 64 flashlights, an accumulator, a control system, and a motion detector. When a passer-by approached the object, the motion detector activated the control system that would send the signal to flashlights. The pedestrian was then blinded by the sharp light of the flash. The work ironically refers to the phenomenon of media publicity and points to the potential – that we all have – of becoming a celebrity.

Selected works by Wojciech Puś – Image Gallery

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Magic Hour (2014) is an intimate and poetically saturated film narrative about the relationship between the artist and nature. The titular ‘magic hour’ is a particular time of the day, right before sunset and just after it, when the light’s angle of incidence and its hue create conditions for taking perfect photos, which camera operators sometimes value particularly highly. Puś cumulated this magic effect thanks to an ultrafast camera, capturing thousand frames per second. Playing them in slow motion allows one to stop this time for longer, and the viewer gets a chance to immerse himself in a magical dimension of reality which normally slips by during regular observation.

The installation A|N (two-channel vide object, LETO Gallery), realised in 2015, is an analytical continuation of the previous work, and according to the artist himself also a ‘documentation of the process of creating falsity’. A|N is based on Oskar Hansen’s concept of the ‘active negative’, which assumed communicating a subject, mental experience of the reception of space. In Puś’s work, the camera becomes the tool for such an analysis. It looks for traces of a couple’s presence, two men who previously spent intimate time together in the filmed room. As the commentary text to the exhibition had it:

The energy field within the architectural structure becomes the essence of the work, revealing the fissure that remains when the figures are no longer present. The memory of past gestures is manifested in the impassive movement of the camera as it sculpts the space, shaping the emptiness within. In the process of recording an event on set, the purpose behind A|N is to reveal the illusion of infinity and a yearning for a repetition that proves impossible.

Puś discussed his approach to working with the medium of film and his understanding of beauty in an interview conducted by Łukasz Ronduda for the book Kino-Sztuka: Zwrot Kinematograficzny W Polskiej Sztuce Współczesnej (Cinema-Art. Cinematographic Turn in Polish Contemporary Art, trans. NS):

I am very precise when I match up the medium I use to the subject I take up. Technology is to be used. INSTANT was created largely on VHS, Given was recorded with a mobile phone and an infrared camera, and Magic Hour had to be high-end, as this was my view on the film. The next dual-screen film, A|N, features a movement of camera designed for Motion Control, which repeats the recorded movement with immense precision. I need this because of the subject as such, it’s not an aesthetic necessity or trying out a technological novelty. A subject that required this equipment came up – it’s as simple as that. Sensitivity to composition, colour, light – that’s another thing. This is uncontrollable. It’s just my way. Both on VHS and high-speed camera, I transfer the way I see onto the picture frame. … In our culture there are beautiful and ugly images, and for many the border between them is clear-cut. Some words are associated with beauty, other – with that which is repulsive, which is perhaps why it might be difficult for some to understand that the image of gushing sperm or a dribble of spit in the corner of the mouth may be beautiful. I don’t make such differentiations and this isn’t forceful aestheticising of the image so that it ‘looks nice’. I think this stems from the fact that I grew up in the countryside, in nature.

Since 2016, Wojciech Puś has been developing multi-layered Endless, a sensual architecture of film, light, and sound that serves as a base structure for a poetic essay, a dream about identities in process. Although it has taken many forms — from feature film, to cinematographic performances and spontaneous situations — its true essence is based on the informal community of performers of different social backgrounds, gender identities, nationalities and migration status (Chile, France, Mexico, Poland, Ukraine). The combination of their personal stories, alongside fragments of literary works, films, memoirs, and dream notes creates a mosaic structure, situated in the genre of queer abstraction. This aesthetic utopia results in a different way of thinking about gender transformation, extending the experience of metamorphosis to the most general, existential experiences of an individual.

In this way, Puś goes beyond the identification of a‘queer artist’ or an activist affirmation in the spirit of Pride, inviting the audience to join the Endless community, where one finds references to Alain Resnais’ new wave film, Last Year in Marienbad, the French writer Michel Leiris’ record of dreams and scenes from his waking life, Nights as Day, Days as Night, or the experimental novel Testo Junkie by Paul B. Preciado. And yet, the kaleidoscope of figures co-creating the work is what constitutes the beating heart of Endless: Magdalena Wawrzyńczak — transsexual performer, hairdresser by day; Szymon Czacki, — actor at the National Stary Theatre in Krakow; Jorge Benavides — queer activist and sexual therapist; Anton Tsyhulskyi — graphic designer and MMA fighter; Pierre Emö — film and theatre actor fulfilling pornographic and mainstream cinema projects; Pat Dudek — androgynous model, director and musician; Lina Bembe — porn actress and performer, Josef Ostendorf - artist known from pieces by Christoph Marthaler and Frank Castorf.

Some of the artist’s works are held by Filmoteka, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Bunkier Sztuki in Kraków, and in private collections in Poland, Germany and Italy. His films have been presented at, among others, T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival in Wrocław and Artists’ Film Biennial at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London.

In theatre, Puś has co-operated with Mariusz Treliński, Paweł Miśkiewicz, Maja Kleczewska, Krzysztof Garbaczewski, Agnieszka Olsten, Monika Pęckiewicz, and Marek Fiedor.

His works have been exhibited in galleries both at home and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Exchange Gallery in Łódź, Entropia Gallery in Wrocław, Leto Gallery in Warsaw, Bunkier Sztuki in Kraków, Stefania Piga Vaselli Gallery in Rome, Palazzo Donà / Signum Foundation in Venice, and Westfälischer Kunstverein in Munich.

Puś works with A:D: Curatorial in Berlin. He lives in Łódź.

Originally written in Polish by Ewa Gorządek, February 2017, translated by NS, February 2017, update: November 2019.