No Local Foundation would like to invite you for the screening of video works by Zorka Wollny, which will inaugurate Vivisesja Festival on 22nd October 2008 at 6.30 pm.
At Vivisesja festival there will be shown three latest films made by a Kraków-based artist, Zorka Wollny. Her films are visual stories concerned with interpersonal relations, with how an individual functions in society, with the repetitiveness of people’s behaviour, and with the influence of culture on our lives. All the films are characterized by an inherent quotation.
“Museum” is a project which combines dance and ritual, parody and reconstruction, playing a part and transgressing it. “Museum” shows a group of dancers/performers in a gallery space who repeat a discreet dance of typical gestures made by exhibition visitors. Melted into the crowd the dancers repeated the movements of the viewers, sometimes imitated themselves, sometimes subtly emphasized the ritual character of the performance. The dance was carefully prepared. Thanks to the drawings, video recording, photographs, and exercises the artist and performers worked out a range of movements, arranged them into sequences, thus writing out an extraordinary ballet. All the movements and gestures were “quotations” from viewers visiting the National Museum in Kraków. “Museum” was additionally complemented by quotations from dance theoreticians and social philosophers, such as: Georgij Gurdżijew, Rudolf Laban, Jerzy Grotowski, or Jean-Paul Sartre. The result is a works which on the formal level reminds us of black-and-white silent films.
“Łucja Szalona” (“Lucia Mad”) is a film which Zorka Wollny prepared this year’s Youth Triennial in Orońsko. It refers to the history of the roles of women in society. Don Nigro’s popular play entitled “Lucia Mad” served for the artist as a means to analyze, restructure, and play the protagonist for whom madness is the only form of female expression in conservative society. The quotation in this work appears also as a reference to works by Polish women artists from the 1920s to the present day. Is being an artist a chance to avoid the consequences? Is it a possibility to find one’s own way of expression? The Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko is an important context for this film as it is a place dominated by male artists. In Zorka’s work there takes place a kind of clash, a confrontation. In the park in Orońsko, in a place where there are numerous sculptural representations of women made by male artists, there was voiced a statement by an artist who presents womanhood from a point of view of a woman. She makes room for the most important Polish women artists, who are somehow absent from the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko.
“Córki” (“Daughters”) is an interpretation of “Utwór o Matce i Ojczyźnie” (“A Work on Mother and Homeland”), a literary work by Bożena Keff. Some critics say that Wollny’s work is a “film poem”, others call it a “women’s family saga” or “film series”. It was made for this year’s exhibition at Bunkier Sztuki Gallery in Kraków entitled “Moja matka nie jest boska” (“My Mother is not Divine”). The film is concerned with the relation between mother and daughter, one which is based on psychological addiction. It shows a figure of Mother, her cultural image, reviewing sacred notions, such as maternity. Zorka Wollny’s work is a story of a struggle with mother and her expectations shown in the context of the story of women in the artist’s family. It depicts the way in which cultural models and clichés are made; they are bonds which are difficult to get rid of. This work is a combination of a game and a documentary.
Additional information: Festiwal Vivisesja webpage and Zorka Wollny webpage.