Sunday and the Collection – Józef Robakowski, The Games Poles Play – film screening

Józef Robakowski, The Games Poles Play, 1989

video, 26 min 2 sec

Work purchased by Arsenal Gallery

11 September 2016, Sunday, 10.00 – 18.00

Arsenal Gallery, ul. A. Mickiewicza 2, Białystok

Free entry!

Work description:

Józef Robakowski, one of the pioneers of video art in Poland, perfectly uses and damasks the manipulative aspects of media. What was important in the artist’s creative career was the examination of relations between himself – the artist/subject – and the film, the means of expression the artist uses. Social and political issues, which also have a place in his works, appear naturally, on the margins of observing the film medium, his relations vis-à-vis truth and objectivism, the creative possibilities and susceptibilities to manipulation.
 
Zabawy Polaków (1981–1989) belongs to this particular current of the artist’s explorations.   The work is a condensed, 26-minute bricolage made up of scenes and image clichés from the last decade of communist Poland. The film is a strong compilation of TV footage of Orange Alternative actions and artistic performances with a coda in the form of a girl counting out rhymes.
 
The recorded footage of brutal pacifications by communist authorities and civil protests is, most of all, a vision of experiences of an individual in a totalitarian state. Scenes from everyday life are intertwined with images of oppression and resistance. The absurdities of the system inevitably entailed the paranoia of quotidian life. The collective portrait of Poles in the last decade of communism is a collage of dramatic choices, escapes into the absurd so as to maintain distance from the preposterousness of the system and the utopian desire for normality which was realized only in childhood ignorance and the activity of counting rhymes, detached from the surrounding world.
 
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