Agnieszka Polska

Directing

Agnieszka Polska

Known for

Directing

Credits

12 titles

Video Artist and photographer. Born in 1985 in Lublin, Poland, Lives and works in Kraków and Berlin. Agnieszka Polska creates video works employing mainly found material, such as archive photography and illustrations, which she subjects to subtle interventions, whether animating them or working them into the existing image. In the process, the artist changes their primary context, simultaneously creating illusions of documentation. She investigates the impact of documentation on its future reception. Her visually powerful explorations of lost times or half-forgotten figures of the Polish avant-garde, turn to how the past is fictionalised and re-worked. Her animated videos evoke a sense of me…

Known for

Hurrah, We Are Still Alive! poster
NR

A group of actors centered around one charismatic director are getting ready to compete for work on a new film. They all want to get closer to him and wil do anything to make it work.

Hurrah, We Are Still Alive!

2020

The Book of Flowers poster
NR

The Book of Flowers is a short film that combines Artificial Intelligence-powered animation with the 16 mm film post production. The film is made in an experimental educational-like format, where static, animated sequences of time-lapse flowers are accompanied by music and the voice-over of a narrator.

The Book of Flowers

2024

The Longing Gaze poster
NR

In this videowork Agnieszka Polska looks into experiences of closeness and distance in times of the pandemic

The Longing Gaze

2021

What the Sun Has Seen poster
7.0

Polska’s unsettling perspective on humanity takes the form of an animated child-faced sun with melancholy eyes. Digitally sourced images paint a frantic image of a crumbling world. From a distance, the sun jokes about environmental issues and comments on the tumultuous times in which the world finds itself.

What the Sun Has Seen

2017

I Am the Mouth II poster
NR

I Am the Mouth II features a pair of disembodied lips that are half-submerged in water, whispering seductively about the mechanisms by which words, in the form of sound waves, make their way through various materials including the viewer’s own body. The steady tone of the voice emanating from the lips hypnotizes the listener, revealing the subliminal influence artists have on their audiences.

I Am the Mouth II

2014

No artwork available
NR

In 1956 a group of students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow locked themselves inside the sculpture and ceramics workshop, transforming the venue of daily labour into a space of passive existence. In her quasi-documentary, Agnieszka Polska re-enacts the strike. Juxtaposing its inherent inaction, not far removed from an artistic performance, with animations showing the humdrum character of everyday creative work, the artist poses a question about the social effectiveness of the artists’ efforts. The film was awarded Grand Prix of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage in the 10th Geppert Competition (2011).

How the Work Is Done

2011

Behind the camera

Hurrah, We Are Still Alive! poster
NR

A group of actors centered around one charismatic director are getting ready to compete for work on a new film. They all want to get closer to him and wil do anything to make it work.

Hurrah, We Are Still Alive!

2020

Hurrah, We Are Still Alive! poster
NR

A group of actors centered around one charismatic director are getting ready to compete for work on a new film. They all want to get closer to him and wil do anything to make it work.

Hurrah, We Are Still Alive!

2020

The Book of Flowers poster
NR

The Book of Flowers is a short film that combines Artificial Intelligence-powered animation with the 16 mm film post production. The film is made in an experimental educational-like format, where static, animated sequences of time-lapse flowers are accompanied by music and the voice-over of a narrator.

The Book of Flowers

2024

The Longing Gaze poster
NR

In this videowork Agnieszka Polska looks into experiences of closeness and distance in times of the pandemic

The Longing Gaze

2021

What the Sun Has Seen poster
7.0

Polska’s unsettling perspective on humanity takes the form of an animated child-faced sun with melancholy eyes. Digitally sourced images paint a frantic image of a crumbling world. From a distance, the sun jokes about environmental issues and comments on the tumultuous times in which the world finds itself.

What the Sun Has Seen

2017

What the Sun Has Seen poster
7.0

Polska’s unsettling perspective on humanity takes the form of an animated child-faced sun with melancholy eyes. Digitally sourced images paint a frantic image of a crumbling world. From a distance, the sun jokes about environmental issues and comments on the tumultuous times in which the world finds itself.

What the Sun Has Seen

2017

I Am the Mouth II poster
NR

I Am the Mouth II features a pair of disembodied lips that are half-submerged in water, whispering seductively about the mechanisms by which words, in the form of sound waves, make their way through various materials including the viewer’s own body. The steady tone of the voice emanating from the lips hypnotizes the listener, revealing the subliminal influence artists have on their audiences.

I Am the Mouth II

2014

No artwork available
NR

In 1956 a group of students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow locked themselves inside the sculpture and ceramics workshop, transforming the venue of daily labour into a space of passive existence. In her quasi-documentary, Agnieszka Polska re-enacts the strike. Juxtaposing its inherent inaction, not far removed from an artistic performance, with animations showing the humdrum character of everyday creative work, the artist poses a question about the social effectiveness of the artists’ efforts. The film was awarded Grand Prix of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage in the 10th Geppert Competition (2011).

How the Work Is Done

2011

The New Sun poster
NR

The animated video The New Sun incorporates a character of the Sun: a child-faced star with a beautiful voice. In its half-sung, poetic monologue, the Sun directs its lover, a human - and in an unsettling manner, presents a gloomy vision of a collapsing world, where the only lasting and immutable elements are the words and language. The Sun‘s speech is a juggle of styles and moods: it goes from the elevated and emotionally-charged confessions to the goofy stand-up comedy, and ends up with an interpretation of „I got love“, a song from the 1970 musical Purlie. The general ambiance of the film is dark, but the sung monologue leaves a space for hope and marks the significance of words as tools of social responsibility.

The New Sun

2017

Ask The Siren poster
NR

a short film presenting the historical and cultural connotations of the figure of Mermaid in the context of Eastern European history. In a poetic fashion, film attempts to describe the Syren as a symbol representing Polish identity crisis, rooted in the annihilation of the pagan history during the Christian colonization of the region in the X-th century. The filmic character presents itself as a being not able to be classified in any social or biological category.

Ask The Siren

—

No artwork available
NR

More than 250 million years ago, at the transition of the Permian to the Triassic eras, the largest known mass extinction in the Earth’s history occurred and up to 90 percent of the planet’s life was annihilated. This disturbing natural phenomenon and its impact are at the centre of “The Happiest Thought”, a Full-Dome visual essay created to be screened in planetariums and domes. The work, which revives the Earth’s destroyed biosphere in a poetic way, is constructed as a hypnotically enchanting séance and narrated by US-American performance artist Geo Wyeth. The film’s point of departure is the “happiest thought” of the physicist Albert Einstein, what he later called the fundamental thought that inspired him to formulate his general theory of relativity in 1915, which understands space and time as dynamic entities.

The happiest thought

—

My Little Planet poster
NR

Film presents an allegorical story of a society, where time is being measured by the movements of daily-use objects rotating around the planet: the Marlboro butt, bottle cap and sticking plaster. In the humorous fashion, the narrator describes the conventionality and arbitrariness of norms implemented on society.

My Little Planet

2016