Agnieszka Polska, "Sensitization to Colour", video, 5'02", 2009, photo: courtesy of the Żak-Branicka Gallery, Berlin
The Żak-Branicka Gallery presents the an ironic triptych exploring a history of misunderstandings, omissions andblack holes in art history
Agnieszka Polska is one of the most interesting Polish artists of the younger generation (born1985), whose work has been shown at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Kunstbygning inAarhus and the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. The source materials of Polska's videos are photographs taken from prewar newspapers and art magazines from the 1960s, which she animates. Polska is interested in the aesthetic of old photographs; their poor quality or raster, which in turn lends itself to giving the animation an old-fashioned documentary quality.
Polska treats art as an archive and takes on the role of an archival critic or librarian. She is interested not inthat which is left to be archived, but that which has been forgotten.
I was thinking of the gap that appears between the knowledge of the art critic and the knowledge of art history. The moment that the art critic stops taking an interest in the work of art, it's often forgotten for the same period of time, before art history is ready to value it once again.
The protagonists of the two films The Forgetting of Proper Names (3'45'') and My Favorite Things (5'35'') are the works of the artists Robert Morris (Three L-Beams, 1965), Robert Smithson (Nine Mirror Displacements, 1969), Walter de Maria (The New York Earth Room, 1977) and Wolf Vostell (In Ulm, um Ulm und um Ulm herum, 1964) amongst others. In Polska's two videos, she deprives the works of their primary context and they consequently lose the function they were meant to have, and are finally grouped as an absurd collection devoid of meaning. Turned into a joke, they become caricatures that have nothing in common with theoriginal intention of the artist. They become a type of prop with which one can kit out a dolls house.
The video Sensitization to Colour (5'02'') refers to the performance of the same title made in 1968 by aPolish avant-garde artist, Włodzimierz Borowski. Borowski, one of the key artists of the Polish conceptual art movement, has, granted, taken his place in history, but is to this day not rightfully appreciated. The performance can be described as painterly and colourful and was documented in black and white photographs, which Polska used as a basis to rebuild the space in which it was originally enacted. She usesmaterials only in greyscale. The film, which can be taken as a commentary on the process of understandingart from the past, shows a new space for the performance, one that has been abandoned by the artist and allviewers. Sensitization to Colour is thus a hypothetical reconstruction of a work of art on the basis ofpresently available photography and studies. Polska as an archeologist reconstructs the work. What accuracy does this reconstruction have? Is the myth of the artist a truthful representation?
Three Videos with Narration questions the ways and intentions of writing the history of art. Are we, after all these years, able to reconstruct the past and correctly interpret art, based only on fragmentory information? And in the end, the artists' first intentions, or even those ellusive elements like humour or irony are often distorted, and art loses its primary context. Polska applies Freud's theory "These are cases in which a name is in fact not only forgotten, but wrongly remembered" to the visual arts.
Opening: March 19, 2010, 6 pm.
Exhibition open until April 24, 2010.
Żak-Branicka Gallery
Lindenstr. 34-35
10969 Berlin
Source: press release