A major strand of Agnieszka Polska’s current practice and thinking is the construction of a pre-history of an emerging global cybernetic consciousness. The animation film The Book of Flowers (2023), devoted to gendered reproductive labor, takes this process a step further - as the pre-history depicted in the film is obviously fabricated. In the film, the deep and enchanting voice of the actress Tina Greatrex guides the listener through the joined history of humankind and flowers. According to the narrator, blooming plants used to be enormous and humans were their main pollinators. A complex symbiosis existed between the species, both humans and flowers unable to reproduce without one another. Over the centuries, humans mastered technologies that allowed them to reproduce without participation of plants and flowers. One technology played a particularly important role: the technology of storytelling.
This history that led to the contemporary state of affairs is told against the backdrop of impassioned Charles-Marie Widor’s Symphony No. 5 Toccata for Organ and a succession of dynamic animations of surreal flowers, often marked with animal- or machine-like textures. A complex process of re-writing early time-lapse plant videos with Artificial Intelligence tools led to the creation of material that could be described as found footage - but with not a single original frame used.
Agnieszka Polska is a visual artist and a film director based in Berlin, who uses computer-generated media to reflect on an individual and their social responsibility in the context of environments driven by the flow of information. Her works, often constructed from affective sound and visual stimuli, examine processes of influence and legitimation in the fields of language, consciousness and history. Polska presented her works in international venues, including the New Museum and the MoMA in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Her solo exhibitions were organised by Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Nottingham Contemporary, Saltzburger Kunstverein, among others. She also took part in the 57th Venice Biennale, 11th Gwangju Biennale, 19th Biennale of Sydney, 14th Shanghai Biennale and 13th Istanbul Biennial. In 2018 she was awarded the German Preis der Nationalgalerie.