The Forgetting of Proper Names

Three Polish Artists Make Their London Debut in Calvert 22

The title of Calvert 22’s most recent exhibition is a tilt of the hat to Freud’s suggestion that forgetfulness may not only be a fault of the memory, but a form of false recollection too – an intended psychoanalytic repression.

What the triplet of Polish debutantes in London (Wojciech Bąkowski, Anna Molska and Agnieszka Polska) have collectively achieved, is to apply this concept to world history. They shine an expository torch on Poland’s marginalised memory. Like when Gertrude Stein disturbingly insisted to Hemingway in a peeling Parisian cafe during the 1920s: “That is what you are. All of you young people who served in the war. You are a Lost Generation.” Yet what spawns from these works is not apathy and nihilism, but an affirmation of identity, a beautiful assertion of lived experience.

As postmodernism has informed us, history is very much contingent, how the past is reshaped over time is undoubtedly a central theme. This exhibition is exactly the manifestation of this contemporary interpretation. An unwavering avant-garde approach sees HD projectors found almost as numerously as CCTV cameras in Central London, and informational placards typed in emboldened Lucida Grande. This form of archaeology’s main aim, however, is not to tell us more about the past, but to introduce us, like an introverted nephew, to their life out of the shadow of Communism. Their techniques are provocative and mindfully violent.

Agnieszka Polska submerges us into a world where we are vulnerable to the unreliability of senses. Where for Freud it was the mind, for these Polish artists, it was the destructive interests of world powers. Her exhibited work is presented solely in film; black and white archival footage, her animations, and arranged scenes. Polska unravels a harrowing tale of starving students on protest, such bleak and inhuman tales being rolled out as if they were dusty carpets. But there is a shrouding in what she conveys to us, the scenes are constructed, and the bodies of students are represented by illustratively folded clothes. Does she aim to represent these entities as soulless, or is she invoking a disembodied emotion in us for something that was never real? Polska, it seems, intends to raise questions about authenticity of emotion.

A graduate of the celebrated workshop under Grzegorz Kowalski at The Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Anna Molska is the one most concerned with social change. Her primary medium is also film, and influence is derived from Cinéma Vérité, especially in its use of amateur performers. Two moving images are fertile in my mind. The first, of some scruffy workers encamped about a hill, atonally riffing about their lives with the unrelenting flow of a factory tower releasing smoke in the background. The second, of a group of elderly women, who speak of premature parental death in a building made of glass, with frosty windows and snow tumbling. Here, they seamlessly merge into song. Whether an apocalyptic choir or a few lonely ladies, it was deeply affecting.

Wojciech Bąkowski’s nuanced approach is much more aligned to the subjectivity of embodied experience. He explores how the intricate encounter of every day life is ritualistic, stemming from a nostalgic glare at childhood to now. Bakowski weaves together sound, images and performance to comprehensively convey his idealist perspective. Captions include: “A multitude of pixels. Blackness, Really Black, but my flat is too small. The projection breaks down.” It is easy for the viewer to connect with something so idiosyncratically humanistic. However, with placards both in Polish and English, the intention is also to raise issues of translation.

A compelling factor of this exhibition is that they intend it as a starting point for workshops, performance, readings, debates and a book club. The Limited Nature of Translation being one of them; to remove the artists from a pedagogic position and to form a dialogic community to galvanise discussion is very honourable. It reflects on an institution that is sincere about its work, and along with a regular smorgasbord of Poland’s finest artists, the potential future is inspiring.

Image Captions:

Agnieszka Polska
 Sensitisation to Colour, 2010
HD video, 5’02”, colour, sound
© the artist, courtesy ŻAK|BRANICKA

Anna Molska
The Weavers, 2009
Video, 12’, sound
Courtesy Foksal Gallery Foundation