Agnieszka Polska — Flowers on the Sun
21 Sep 2024 - 12 Jan 2025
The first solo exhibition of Berlin-based Polish artist Agnieszka Polska in Belgium, Flowers on the Sun, featured a selection of recent works, including her latest film, The Book of Flowers (2023), created with the assistance of AI-powered tools.
During her art studies, Agnieszka Polska began creating animations using traditional techniques such as glass table animation. Later, she developed an interest in digital animation and the immersive qualities of the images she creates. Various storytelling formats are crucial to her films. She explores these narratives not only in video works but also in other mediums such as feature film and theater performance. These different forms naturally extend her artistic practice.
For a while, she was interested in the speculative history of avant-garde movements, but now she tends to draw upon stories and inspirations related to planetary socio-technological systems, global changes and contemporary crises. Her influences include visual culture and science fiction works by authors such as Stanisław Lem, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Brian Catling, among others.
Imagination plays a significant role in Agnieszka Polska’s work. Her creations, which blend the realism of images with phantasmagorical visions, often result in a humorous mix of irony and melancholy. The aesthetics of documentary merge with fiction in her films. Polska creates her works with meticulous attention to detail, consciously shaping the structure of her films. She writes scripts with the cinematic gaze and viewer engagement in mind, making the audience an integral part of the experience. Alongside the sophisticated and highly refined visuals, the sound design and the hypnotic voice of the narrator play crucial roles. In The New Sun (2017), a star with the face of a child engages in an emotional monologue with the viewer.
In her recent projects, she hints at a future of filmmaking that may shift towards world-building rather than traditional storytelling.
With the support of the Polish Institute in Brussels and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
With special thanks to Nathan Gray.
The Muhka extends its gratitude to all lenders: Marcin Studniarek, dela.art collection, Dawid Radziszewski Gallery in Warsaw.
About the artist
Agnieszka Polska uses computer-generated media to reflect on individuals and their social responsibility. She‘s rendering the ethical, political and societal challenges of our time into immersive, meditative and hallucinatory films and installations. Composed largely of found, digitally manipulated images, her works examine processes of influence and legitimation in the fields of language, consciousness, and history. Agnieszka Polska is a Polish artist who lives and works in Berlin. She presented her works in international venues, including the New Museum and the MoMA in New York, Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Tate Modern in London, and Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Her solo exhibitions were organised by Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Nottingham Contemporary, Saltzburger Kunstverein, among others. She also took part in the 57th Venice Biennale, 11th Gwangju Biennale, 19th and 24th Biennale of Sydney, 14th Shanghai Biennale, and 13th Istanbul Biennial. In 2018, she was awarded German Preis der Nationalgalerie.
Visitor Guide
About IN SITU
Through the IN SITU programme, Muhka invests in the contemporary art scene. Artists from around the world are invited to create new work in the Point Room, the museum’s most atypical space. Experimentation takes centre stage: here, artists can push the boundaries of their practice with the support of the museum. IN SITU highlights the pioneering spirit of both emerging and established talents.
