Sights and Sounds: Poland

On a curatorial speed visit to Umeå, in northern Sweden, I sat in a room and received local artists, one by one, twenty minutes each, for a full day. I no longer remember most of their faces or names. What linger are the weird tales I was told: a story of reclaiming a Sami identity; four police officers near the Arctic Circle, daily patrolling an area bigger than Holland; dust as sculpture; an illegal porn cinema on the ferries to Latvia. All of that odd testimony was mediated into photographs, performances, or films. Listening to the artists, I felt like a kind of curatorial shrink, a therapist receiving a variety of peculiar patients whose unique cases and problems were sublimated into art.

Artists are our nomadic storytellers, repositories of ideological or historical dilemmas, investigators of social inequities. Artists are detectives, researchers, but also social advocates and activists, questioning the gray zones of the status quo.

This selection of films from Poland, Georgia, Germany, and Hungary offers stories with historical and political layers, subtexts, or backgrounds: the mystery of the October Revolution train, the rise of religious fundamentalism in the Caucasus, a Hungarian town driven by feelings of offence and sorrow, and a landscape of maritime entropy with a Chinese shipwreck.

Joanna Warsza
Curator

Joanna Warsza (b. Warsaw, 1976) is a curator of visual and performing arts and architecture in Berlin and Warsaw. She works mostly in the public sphere, examining social and political agendas. She was curator of the Public Program at Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg (2014), curator of the Georgian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), associate curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale (2012), and co-curator of the 2013 Göteborg [Gothenburg] Biennial. She edited Stadium X – A Place that Never Was (2009), Forget Fear (2012), and Ministry of Highways: A Guide to the Performative Architecture of Tbilisi (2013).

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