Agnieszka Polska, The Kiss, 2012. C-Print, 50 x 70 cm. Courtesy Żak | Branicka, Berlin. © the artist.
Pseudoword Hazards, Agnieszka Polska’s large-scale installation, comprises a series of video works and photographs created over recent years. The young Polish artist draws on illustrations from old newspapers, magazines, and books, animating them in dream-like worlds of surreal video pieces
The young Polish artist’s research focuses on the theme of memory. The rich history of Polish avant-garde art is one point of reference in her work; psychological connotations of forgetting as discovered by Freud form another phenomenon delved into by Polska.
Two videos presented in Salzburg concern Polish art history. How the Work Is Done takes up the history of an art strike at the Academy of Art in Kraków in 1956, and Sensitization to Colour attempts to reconstruct an exhibition by the Polish avant-garde artist Włodzimierz Borowski. The Forgetting of Proper Names, on the other hand, addresses the psychopathology of everyday life as described by the founder of psychoanalysis.
An alchemistic approach is inherent in Polska’s works as she breathes new, glorified life into found objects. The lost and forgotten develop a new “unearthly” presence in her artwork.
Agnieszka Polska was born in 1985 in Lublin. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and at Berlin University of the Arts. Polska lives and works in Warsaw. The artists creates video works employing mainly found material, such as archive photography and illustrations, which she subjects to subtle interventions, either by animating them or working them into an existing image. In the process, she changes their primary context, nonetheless creating illusions of documentation. Polska’s 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.
The Pseudoword Hazards exhibition opened on the 18th of July, and it is on through the 15th of September 2013.
Salzburger Kunstverein
Künstlerhaus
Hellbrunner Straße
3 5020 Salzburg
Tuesday–Sunday 12–7 pm
Paulina Schlosser, source: culture.pl, http://www.salzburger-kunstverein.at, 30.07.2013
Thumbnail credits: How the Work Is Done, 2011, video, color, sound, 6 min 26 sec. Photo: © the artist, courtesy Żak | Branicka