Polnische Videos 2003-2007 aus der Sammlung des WRO Art Centers, Wroclaw, Polen
A curatorial choice of video works from the collection of WRO Art Center corresponding in different ways and on various levels to the tradition of Romanticism.
The program features videos created between 2003-2007 which, although strongly rooted in reality and dealing with contemporary issues, can also be interpreted by applying romantic motifs. Using the classical genre of media art, a single channel video, the works deliver a whole range of romantic topoi which have strongly influenced intellectual history, culture and art since the Era of Romanticism.
To what extent the romantic tradition, often being regarded as the inaugural moment of modernity, is naturally placed within the context of contemporary video art from Poland becomes visible in the œuvre of artists gathered in the program prepared for Ursula Blickle Video Lounge.
To the image of a tragic hero in the solitary fight against his own limitations and the established order of the world refer Jacek Niegoda and Jan Poppenhagen, delivering critical statements.
Tomasz Partyka in the work The Guard allegorises the desire for freedom resulting from tension between the individual and the oppressive system, represented here with the post-communist ritual. The motif of a dreamlike journey of a hero has been taken up by Jacek Ko?ciuszko, while intuition, imagination and the primacy of the subjective perception over the objective reality emerges from works by Kathrin Maria Wolkowicz, Malgorzata Dobke, Anna Orlikowska and Joanna Hoffman.
Andrzej K. Urbanski and Mira Boczniowicz use the camera as a tool in search for sacrum, examining its status in the commercialized public sphere: making full circle in one single shot, it brings a quite absurd but profound insight. In The Eye, the work closing the set, Grzegorz Gonsior refers directly to the romantic topos of the eye as a reflection of a human psyche and an instrument to record the reality, that is perceived from a strongly subjective point of view: all along the film, most of the frame is occupied by the author’s eye, which together with the surroundings, has been recorded using a specially constructed tripod. The romantic struggle to unify what perceives with what is being perceived has been fulfilled within one frame.
Curated by Piotr Krajewski and Agnieszka Kubicka-Dzieduszycka