In her new double-channel video installation entitled Glasshouses, Molska combines two of her recent films: the quasi-documentary Mourners and Hecatomb, a surreal mise-en-scène originally shot on 16mm. Both films take place in green houses, one now used as a gallery, a pristine white space, the other a rundown vacant work place.
The narrative sphere developed during the social experiment of the Mourners set into motion by the artist, provided the base for the visionary performance of Hecatomb. However phantasmatic this second film's scenery might appear, its style is concrete and down to earth. Both films operate with in a restricted minimal setting and use a limited range of precisely chosen down played props. These subtly directed sceneries provocate peculiar afterimages, an atmospheric color scheme appears: the pale brown winter coats of the Mourners make for an opaque and compact sculptural presence and the dirty corrugated green roof sheets of the glass house in Hecatomb fill the abandoned space with an animated light-temperature, - a remote stage for an unpredictable act.
Molska set herself up in the village of Orońsko, known for its community of artists and sculptors and got in touch with a small community of folk singers called Jarzebina. The artist altered their environment and discarded all the trappings of the everyday, given neutral working clothes and welcomed into a greenhouse, which also serves as a gallery. The women got to speaking and it turned out that a frequent topic of conversation was the issue of death and evil. Hence the topic of the work, which the Mourners explore in an intimate way, giving it some mythological and spiritual significance. A year later she took up the subject of death and evil again in the work Hectacomb, set in the same greenhouse, but functioning as its own stand-alone piece. The artist explains the meaning of the title and its significance in the film,
In Ancient Greece, a hecatomb (Greek hecaton = 100) was a sacrifice of one hundred cattle. The term has also come to denote a sacrifice in general and is connected with a sense of loss. The film's structure is based on cyclicality, the film starting and ending with an almost identical scene of entering the same space anew. It is an attempt to show what I fear the most, as well as - in a general sense - my vision of the fears of the Mourners. I decided to show 'my evil' not by using the phantasm of the devil or an image of death as a Grim Reaper, but by creating the atmosphere of, or describing in filmic terms the notion of 'acedia'.(...)
In my experiments I consciously confronted two forms by approaching the situation twice in a similar way - in neither case were there any retakes, arranged scenes or any form of mise-en-scène except small additions in the form of introductory passages. The crucial event was one-time and unique filmed in one take, although using multiple points of view (two mobile cameras in Mourners, five in Hecatomb). (...)
I am interested in combining things realistic with abstract. I think such a gesture can only be afforded by art, as otherwise the combination irritates, especially when we look routinely from the viewpoint of moviemaking conventions.
Anna Molska's (born 1983) video works are filmed performances. She invites ordinary people, instead of professional actors, to be protagonists, thus allowing for an authenticity, uncertainty even, and natural spontaneity that is an integral part of the work. She reconsiders revolutionary thought's power to cause social change through investigations of avant-garde visual and political idioms.
Szklarnie / Glasshouses premiered in December 2011 at Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw. In 2009 Molska presented the US premier of her film The Weavers at BROADWAY 1602, New York.
Glasshouses runs between the 14th of January - the 28th of February 2012 at the BROADWAY 1602 gallery in New York City.
BROADWAY 1602
1181 Broadway, Floor 3
New York, NY 10001
Source: press materials