Modern Post Mortem
24 January 2009, At 6 PM
Centre for Contemporary Art Laznia
Jaskolcza 1
PL80-767 Gdansk

Although modernism has come to an end, modernist thought is still alive. The idea of changing the world and bringing new order is prevailing and subject to numerous transmutations. So is socialism, which keeps changing and seeking to put revolutionary ideas into practice. In a film, Brzezinski wish to juxtapose Soviet socialism with an intellectual and sophisticated French socialism, as well as, with Polish social reality. As a result, the film s recipients will be able to transfer certain values and mental situations from one area to another. Images taken from the home archive of people belonging to post-punk culture were here put side by side with the pictures showing the dark side of living in a post-soviet reality and D. Vertov s film Enthusiasm: Donbass Symphony. Moreover, the film The Society of the Spectacle was re-edited to fit G. Debord s text. Apparently then, the work becomes a recycling of culture and memory enriched with abstract elements, closed-eye visions and the aesthetics of video images.

The technique of digital electronics was used in the film completion. However, it only simulates other media and employs temporal aspects of time during which the film was made. Hence, it seems to be a perfect medium for a found footage mystification. My approach to the simulation of other media effects is a flexible one. Occasionally, I tend to cause a disturbance by distorting video and marking it with the traits of film images, or vice versa. It is then an innocent play with the role of propaganda films, even those from the home archive.

Each and every medium is, after all, ideologically marked.

Thorsten Fleisch
6 February 2009, At 6 PM
Centre for Contemporary Art Laznia
Jaskolcza 1
PL80-767 Gdansk

Thorsten Fleisch, German artist, winner of many prestigious awards visits Parakino. His works have become a constant show at film festivals. His films examine the relationship with great sensitivity and awareness of historical context. His films are also a full sense of the word experiment and the artist becomes a researcher looking for new ways to view the new images, new contexts.

Landscape Film
20 February 2009, At 6 PM
Centre for Contemporary Art Laznia
Jaskolcza 1
PL80-767 Gdansk

Landscape film is a trend of the British film avant-garde. It refers to the structural focus on the nature of the medium (the characteristic feature of cinematic representation), with the emphasis on its illusionary character, easily recognisable thanks to the references to the history of art and art-historical category of the landscape. The essential artists of landscape film were Chris Welsby and William Raban. As representative examples, A.L. Rees lists Park Film (1972) and Streamline (1976) of Chris Welsby, River Ya (1972) of William Raban and Welsby. Dagmara Rode s presentation includes posterior works of the artists.

Ryszard W. Kluszczynski
14 March 2009, At 6 PM
Centre for Contemporary Art Laznia
Jaskolcza 1
PL80-767 Gdansk

PIONEERS OF VIDEO ART: WOODY AND STEINA VASULKA
Professor Ryszard W. Kluszczynski s presentation provides an occasion to look at the art of the classics of the genre systematically and methodologically. Using their art as example, the lecturer will introduce his original topology of video art. Woody and Steina Vasulka is an artist couple who exerted an enormous impact on the development of video art, playing an exceptional role in the field. Active since the 1960s, they created video tapes, installations and performance. They founded The Kitchen  the famous New York-based alternative organisation. Together with Gene Youngblood and Peter Weibel, they shaped the ideas of media art. They contributed especially to the development of video which used devices processing and generating electronic signals. Still active today, they combine artistic creation and educational and curatorial activity.

Krzysztof Jurecki: The Significance Of Mechanical Reproduction
20 March 2009, At 6 PM
Centre for Contemporary Art Laznia
Jaskolcza 1
PL80-767 Gdansk

A presentation of the book of Krzysztof Jurecki. It contains twenty conversations about photography, performance, video and painting, carried with both renowned as well as less known artists of considerable artistic potential. The interviews are categorised into groups. The first one are conversations with the artists of the neo-avant-garde and Kultura Zrzuty (Andrzej Rózycki, Andrzej Kwietniewski of Lódz Kaliska art group, Zbigniew Libera and Grzegorz Zygier), who sometimes distance themselves from the mainstream (Rózycki). The next group are women artists with feminist viewpoint: Ewa Swidzinska and Magdalena Samborska. Joanna Zastrózna, Magda Hueckel and Sylwia Kowalczyk represent ideologies of different kind, even if being close to feminism. The dominant of the book is located in the third cluster of interviews, devoted to the topic of the sacred, the religiousness or the lack of it, search for spirituality in the Christian aspect (Zbigniew Treppa, Jan G. Issaieff, Basia Sokolowska), in the aspect of the Far East (Andrzej Dudek-Dürer, Katarzyna Majak), in the aspect of shamanism (Marek Rogulski) or video technology (Michal Brzezinski). The last group is represented by the artists true to photography, though of differing origin, like: photography teacher Waldemar Jama, pictorialist and portraitist Marek Gardulski, Wojciech Zawadzki  one of the founder of the programme of elementary photography and Jelenia Góra school of photography and Ireneusz Zjezdzalka  representative of the new documentary .