In her works, Agnieszka Polska analyses time and memory. She makes use of archives and fabricated visual materials styled on pictures from a few decades ago. The history of art, especially of the 60s and 70s, is often a subject in her works – its myths and unverifiable legends, as well as its mechanisms of memory, amnesia and repression.
The exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary will also feature a quasi-documentary film, How the Work is Done, in which Polska reconstructs the situation of the students’ protest of 1956, as well as the Future Days film, the screenplay for which was written in cooperation with the curator Sebastian Cichocki. The work speaks about an imaginary heaven for artists and the afterlife of those who vanished from the history of art. Among them there are figures such as Lee Lozano, a conceptual artist who withdrew from the New York art scene at the beginning of the 70s, having previously been an active participant, or the legendary Bas Jan Ader, who died during a lonely trip across the Atlantic.
The never-ending common stay in the afterlife gives the artists, who couldn’t meet each other in life, an opportunity to meet and discuss. It’s not until they are in heaven that artists and theoreticians such as Włodzimierz Borowski and Jerzy Ludwiński have an opportunity to exchange opinions with, for example, Charlotte Posenenske or Paul Thek – says Agnieszka Polska in an interview with Piotr Pękała of Szum magazine.
At the Nottingham Contemporary the artist is also to show her latest works: Watery Rhymes and I am the Mouth, which the exhibition is named after. This short animation inspired by the Not I drama by Samuel Beckett is based on scientific descriptions of soundwaves transferred through different kinds of matter. In Polska’s work, a mouth half-immersed in water is the “voice of the work of art”, and the viewer’s body is the transmitter.
As part of the exhibition, a special live performance will also take place on 21st October at 18:30-20:00. Angieszka Polska, along with curator Sebastian Cichocki, will interview the characters of the Future Days film as if they were still alive.
The exhibition at the Nottingham Contemporary museum is organized in cooperation with Culture.pl.
Agnieszka Polska - I am the Mouth
18.10-4.01.2014
Curator: Sebastian Cichocki
Sources: nottinghamcontemporary.org, artmuseum.pl, magazynszum.pl, culture.pl, ed. Agnieszka Sural, transl. szm, 22.10.2014