Hamburger Bahnhof / Museum für Gegenwart: Berlin Agnieszka Polska: The Demon’s Brain (29.09.2018 – 03.03.2019)
The Demons brain is a multi channel video instillation, covering ethical topics. This piece consisted of four large format projection screens and a wall of text, your welcomed in to take a seat of the many bunch of mattress and memory foam flung around the room, for me this really opened my eyes to the large scale projection, each film corresponding with the same sound.
This piece is engaging, its historical, it makes you question the great responsibilities we find yourself stuck within, this piece particularly stood out to me for its distinct visuals, its hard to pin point the time frame within history that this is aiming to get across, I feel this is a simplistic way of keeping your audiences attentions at all time. I found myself completely transfixed; in fact we sat and watched all four projections one by one at least three times. We then sat once more but this time watched all four screens.
One screen shows a beautiful film, of trees and a galloping horse with a man that changes into a narrative of its own, showing the mans life, the other screens correspond what is happening to him. The remaining screen shows the face of a crow that narrates the entire thing, one shows a wooden hallway (mines), tracking fast paced throughout, giving the overruling feeling that your falling deeper and deeper within, and the final almost showing I micro scoping organism moving alike a heartbeat.
This piece is said to explore the possibilities in which we have as individuals, the choice to take personal action and take responsibility for the worlds problems, yet we see that the messenger “the crow” has demonic traits, yet this does force us to the realisation that if he was around today he evidently without choice wouldn’t be able to change anything.
Overall both The Demons Brain and Agnieszka both inspired me, teaching me that one audio can correspond multiple avenues of visuals, for me this was something new but something id love to take further into my career and peruse a piece of work alike this that have multiple projections yet only of narration. This defiantly changed my opinion on how id like to set up our degree show installation, I’d love to incorporate themes from this work or at least the set up, something I personally thought was humbling was the mattresses and memory foam on the floor, even though this is something so simple it allowed the audience to get comfy, “make themselves at home” sort of speak, without this laid back set up I don’t feel people would have stuck around for such extended time frames, as I said before we watched this work at least four times.
On returning home I looked much more into this particular piece and found out much more about the artist herself and the films backstory, from my research I found work is in fact a collection of fifteenth-century letters addressed to Mikołaj Serafin, the custodian of Poland’s salt mines. Polska is said to meld live action with animation to tell the fictional story of a young messenger tasked with delivering these letters on horseback. The boy eventually loses his horse and he gets lost in the forest. Having an unexpected encounter with a demon.
Overall a beautiful, captivating multichannel video instillation that overviews many topic surrounding today, the demand of everyday, resources consumption, environmental destruction and artificial intelligence.
