Agnieszka Polska, 2013
© Agnieszka Polska, still from "Future Days", 2013.
Agnieszka Polska: Future Days
In her film, Polska describes the future as a space deprived of any attributes other than memory. The mutual influences of the past and the forthcoming events are staged in at once ludicrous and melancholic situation of the ‘heaven for the artists’, where the artists from different generations meet after death. The encounter in the symbolic, phantasmal landscape is followed by the discussions exploring the notion of human desire for methaphysics and the urge toward the sublime and knowledge.
“The structure of Future Days, the constant “stumbling” over the remains of works of art (which are, perhaps, not works of art at all, but rather their material after-effects), recalls a classic, pseudo-touristic text by Robert Smithson, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, which was first published in Artforum in 1967. The artists blundering through heaven are forever talking and thinking about art, the horizon of the new ultimately out of sight. Condemned to eternity, they can no longer dream of originality or “progress.” As Bas Jan Ader once suggested, they are “consumers of extreme comfort,” endlessly staring into the past. (…)”
Excerpt from Sebastian Cichocki, Agnieszka Polska, Future Days, or: The Artist as Sight-seer, in “Tourists Like Us-Critical Tourism and Contemporary Art” (eds.: Frederika Martini and Vytautas Michelkevičius), ECAV-Ecole Cantonale d`Art du Valais, Sierre and Vilnius Academy of Arts Press in association with VAA Nida Art Colony, 2013. Read more
was born in 1985 in Lublin, Poland. She lives and works in Berlin and Cracow. Polska graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow and from the Universität der Künste, Berlin. She first began exhibiting her works in Cracow in 2007. Since then she has participated in group exhibitions at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, in 2010 and 2011 and Tate Modern, London, in 2012. Polska won the Grand Prix in the Geppert Award 2011 for her video piece How the Work Is Done.