JACEK MALINOWSKI – Fitness

FITNESS

The title of the exhibition is the most adequate when it concerns first film, where the action takes place in a fitness club – it broadens the context of an English word “fit” by other meanings that are included in other works, such as: adjustment, adaptation…

At the exhibition four films/projections by Jacek Malinowski will be presented:

„As Hitherto” (2003),
„Simulation” (2002),
„The Celebration of Erwin Koloczek” (2007)
„Marker – the first draft” (2008).

About my films

Before I was involved in making films, I realized multimedia spatial installations using sculpture objects, photographs and simple video projections. The film gave me totally new possibilities, it allowed me to build more complex structures, of a specific logistics, to evoke mood and create new forms or realities.

The first film I made was mostly related to the traditional documentary. It presented the characters in a specific situation, whose actual reasons and results were presented with the accuracy of documentary broadcast.

Since the next film (“HalfAWoman”, 2000) I have become interested in a particular kind of a documentary – seemingly authentic film, which is though based on facts and the characters who are completely constructed by me. During the next years the following films were made:

„SSS” (2001), „Wariant 3 (realized)” (2002), „Simulation” (2002), „As Hitherto” (2003), „HalfAWoman 2” (2005), „The Celebration of Erwin Koloczek” (2007), „HalfAWoman …three years later” (2008) – the films gradually developing, but they also question the strategy of a “documentary fiction”.

Thus, these films are based on fiction, they give the impression of the documentary records that were made for real. The characters put in front of a video camera tell the stories in such a way as if they told about themselves and as if the emotions coming from their statements related to their own experiences – but actually they don’t.

Jacek Malinowski
www.jacekmalinowski.com

[…] Jacek Malinowski’s strategy is revealed in the way he constructs each film. He observes the world to extract separate motives and distill the „essence of reality”. Beginning with his first film „HalfAWoman” (2000) – he locates his films on the border of fact and fiction, and as an artist he has gone through significant evolution. Using the formula of „fake documentary” he asks seemingly contradictory questions: can art reflect reality; does the viewer want to be fooled, do real – „genuine” documentaries exist; is reality, but also reality’s subjective perception, falsified by the „media narration” they contain? In other words: „how much of reality does reality contain”? Finally: isn’t it true that art uncovers the true nature of things? Aren’t the actors/characters of documentary film fully created by the director, or can they gain an autonomy to bring new meanings to the film in which they’re acting? […]

fragment of an essay by Małgorzata Heymer
„Deconstruction of fake documentary”
that will be published in the exhibition catalogue
„Fitness” by Jacek Malinowski
(published by Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok 2009)

[…] Though instead of repeating the arguments, that every art work – also film, because

it is cropped, edited, directed and staged – has to be naturally to a certain extent unauthentic, or to be more precise – instead of repeating that the inauthenticity describes the art work’s factuality and factography, instead of crying over inauthenticity of documentary films, lets focus on the more paradox phenomenon: the authenticity of fiction.

Thus on the phenomenon that transforms films of Jacek Malinowski into facts. The specific factuality of these films is based upon something to be called the liminal state of fiction.

We may say that in all of his films Jacek Malinowski carefully constructs the fiction, carefully bends it, questions it or even sometimes destroys it. Even if the bending or questioning of such fiction does not distract from the film’s story, it successfully distracts the functionality of that story, which prevents Jacek Malinowski’s films from fitting into the category of paradocumentary. […]

fragment of an essay by Jarosław Lubiak
„Stories based upon authentic facts”
that will be published in the exhibition catalogue
„Fitness” by Jacek Malinowski
(published by Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok 2009)