Still-frame from Krzysztof Tchórzewski's documentation of Szapocznikow's studio in 1973
A series of screenings and discucssions delves into diverse approaches to the reading - and potential misreadings - of contemporary Polish art, from the works of Agnieszka Polska to Hanna Włodarczyk’s documentary on Alina Szapocznikow and other films about the prominent Polish artist
The Tate Modern recently acquired a collection of works by Alina Szapocznikow, which is part of a major retrospective currently on tour around the world. Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972 is currently on show at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles through the end of April. Szapocznikow held a unique position in the post-war European avant-garde. Her work, which fuses late, dark Surrealism with a bright and sexually provocative Pop sensibility, spans a continuously productive period from the 1950s to her untimely death in 1973. Her work has inspired many artists and filmmakers, among them Hanna Włodarczyk whose documentary The Trace (Ślad, 1976) presents a poetic look at her life and works. The Art and Film evening at the Tate Modern also hosts Jean-Marie’s Drot’s interview with the artist shot in her studio in Warsaw in 1969 and recently discovered video recording by Krzysztof Tchórzewski shot shortly after the artist’s death in her studio in Malakoff.
The documentaries are presented in the context of the video works of Agnieszka Polska (born 1985), a Berlin-based Polish artist who creates video, animated films and photography. She constructs her works employing mainly found material, such as archive photography and illustrations, which she subjects to subtle interventions, whether animating them or working them into the existing image. In the process, the artist changes their primary context, simultaneously creating illusions of documentation. She investigates the impact of documentation on its future reception. Her visually powerful explorations of lost times or half-forgotten figures of the Polish avant-garde, turn to how the past is fictionalised and re-worked. The. Her animated videos evoke a sense of melancholia, and a longing for something that perhaps never was, but which she makes real at least on film. Each of the presented films - The Forgetting of Proper Names, My Favorite Things, Sensitization to Colour - are only a few minutes long, whittling down images and the emotions they evoke to a concise dose. The titles of the works also borrow from the past, referencing the conceptual art of the 1960s.
As Polska says,
Misunderstandings or erroneous interpretations are all factors, which push art forward creating new values and posing new questions. An archive - as every living organism - is alive and subject to incessant change, forever multiplying images of itself. The elements negated and rejected during the process of archivisation, later appear as the dark matter of our subconsciousness.
Agnieszka Polska, Sensitization to Colour, 2009. Courtesy of Zak/Branicka
The Forgetting of Proper Names (2009) and My Favorite Things (2010) present works by artists including Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria and Wolf Vostell that are pulled from their primary context and, as a consequence, deprived of their ‘artistic’ function. The video Sensitization to Colour (2009) refers to the performance of the same title made in 1968 by an avant-garde artist, Włodzimierz Borowski, one of the key figures of Polish conceptualism. The film is a hypothetical reconstruction of the performance, based on black-and-white photographs documenting it.
Watch Agnieszka Polska's video works in the online archives of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
Programme
Screenings take place at the Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium on the 14th of March, 2012
The Forgeting of Proper Names
dir. Agnieszka Polska / 2009 / 4 mins
My Favorite Things
dir. Agnieszka Polska / 2010 / 6 mins
Sensitization to Colour
dir. Agnieszka Polska / 2009 / 5 mins
The Trace
dir. Hanna Włodarczyk / 1976 / 13 min, 14 sec
The screenings and performance are followed by a Q&A session with Agnieszka Polska and Hanna Włodarczyk, and a discussion with Agnieszka Polska, Elena Filipovic, Stuart Comer and Kasia Redzisz. The event has been organised in conjunction with the current exhibition at the Calvert 22 Gallery in London presenting the works of three young Polish artists for the first time in London: Wojciech Bąkowski, Anna Molska and Agnieszka Polska. The exhibition is on through the 18th of March 2012.
See more on The Forgetting of Proper Names at Calvert 22
The event is also part of the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival in London between the 8th-23rd of March 2012.
See more on the 2012 Kinoteka Festival in London
Source: Tate Modern, Żak Branicka Gallery, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
Editor: Agnieszka Le Nart