Agnieszka Polska: Softly Spoken

The first solo exhibition of Berlin-based Polish artist Agnieszka Polska in Ireland, Softly Spoken is staged in two chapters—each showing three looped and consecutively screened video works. Each selection contains a mix of early and more recent pieces including her latest film Mirrored Garden. Based on fictional stories blended with elements of science-fiction, the first thematic chapter highlights the ways in which social norms are established and implemented. The second focuses on the civic responsibilities of the artist and the impact they may have on their surroundings.

Agnieszka Polska’s video works often employ the process of montage, combining found and digitally manipulated material and images. Drawing largely on the conventions of documentary, her early works were driven by explorations into the less exposed or forgotten protagonists of post-war art history and the Polish avantgarde, and they possess an archival subconscious that addresses the misunderstandings, misrepresentations, absences, disappearances and errors of human memory. Polska deliberately interferes with the established rules of history making and processes of representation in order to challenge the conventional “museum-archive consciousness” and “reshape what has been collected without fear.” Her recent video works witness a shift in focus towards the complex mechanisms and interplay of visual perception and language. They touch upon contemporary urgencies such as environmental catastrophe, the rise of nationalistic sentiments, and the social responsibility of the individual. Informed by her interest in diverse approaches to quantum theory and soft manipulation techniques such as ASMR, Polska’s digitally generated contemplative image/sound-worlds explore sensorial and cognitive borders and the limits of the human mind. The alluring anesthetized voice-overs support the immersive quality of her video environments. The process of immersion becomes a political act, described by Polska as a “tool for creating an environment competitive with the environment of seduction that surrounds, for example, organized religions.”

Chapter 1: April 19–May 16: Mirrored Garden (2018) My Little Planet (2017) Guns (2014) (with Witek Orski)

Chapter 2: May 17–June 16: New Sun (2017) I Am the Mouth II (2014) How the Work Is Done (2011)

Agnieszka Polska (Lublin, Poland) lives and works in Berlin. Solo exhibitions have been organized by the New Museum in New York, the National Gallery in Prague, Nottingham Contemporary in the UK, and the Salzburger Kunstverein in Austria. Polska’s work has been included in exhibitions and screenings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the 19th Biennale of Sydney, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the 13th Istanbul Biennial, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the 11th Gwangju Biennale, and the 57th Venice Biennale. Last year Agnieszka Polska was awarded the Preis der Nationalgalerie for her installation at the museum. The award includes with the publication of a monograph, and a solo exhibition in autumn 2018 in one of Berlin’s state museums.

Reasearch Residency 2018 Åsa Sonjasdotter: Cultivating Stories
With a particular interest in questions emerging from the practice of plant breeding, Åsa Sonjasdotter engages in processes of co-species knowledge, memory, loss and prospect through the cultivation of plants, imagery and stories. Sonjasdotter’s work has been presented in numerous art-, science-, and farming- contexts. Her recent multi-year research, exhibition, and publication project Cultivating Stories—hosted and co-produced by Project Arts Centre together with Archive Kabinett / Books Berlin and various national and international partners. The project aims to establish a platform for figuration of possible forms for practice and understanding that give a deeper and more complex meaning to the term cultivation. Having worked in different settings with stories on and by potatoes—a plant that has a special role in modern capitalist and colonial history, her research will focus on tracing the potentially subversive stories of outlawed potatoes’ varieties that are today forbidden or marginalized by professional farming legislation, as they are too genetically lively and diverse to fit industrial criteria.

Project Arts Centre is generously supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Dublin City Council.