Moving Images at Sapieha Palace: Agnieszka Polska
2025.04.26
11:00–19:00
Sapieha Palace (L. Sapiegos str. 13, Vilnius)
The video works of Berlin-based Polish artist Agnieszka Polska draw viewers into a hypnotic journey through multilayered, artificial yet simultaneously familiar worlds constructed using animation techniques and digital technologies. In her early practice, Polska focused on overlooked episodes in avant-garde art history, exploring the power of art and the responsibility of artists. Her more recent works shift toward the interconnectedness of humans and other life forms within socio-technological infrastructures, reflecting on the ecological state of the planet and its future. Storytelling plays a central role in Polska’s creative work. Moving fluidly between melancholy and irony, she encourages viewers to actively engage with the artwork and reflect on their own feelings and experiences in a dynamically changing world.
Agnieszka Polska is a visual artist who uses film and computer-generated media to examine the individual’s social responsibility in environments shaped by the constant flow of information. Her work has been shown at major international venues including the New Museum and MoMA in New York, Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Tate Modern in London, and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Her solo exhibitions have been organised by Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Nottingham Contemporary, and Salzburger Kunstverein, among others. She has participated in the 57th Venice Biennale, the 11th Gwangju Biennale, the 24th and 19th Biennales of Sydney, and the 13th Istanbul Biennial.
Film Programme:
The Book of Flowers, 2023, 9’38”
The Book of Flowers presents an alternative history of human-plant ecology, depicting a world where floral species and humans have existed in close symbiosis for thousands of years. This short science-fiction film features animation generated by artificial intelligence, trained by the artist using original 16mm found footage of blooming flowers. Polska’s work functions both as an ecofeminist exercise in world-building and as a meditation on the future of filmmaking and traditional narrative techniques.
Perfect Lives, 2019, 14’6″
In Perfect Lives, Polska reflects on a 1990 control experiment conducted as the Galileo spacecraft passed Earth on its way to Jupiter. Scientists sought to determine whether data sent from Galileo would confirm the existence of life on Earth. The resulting film is a dense, hypnotic essay, composed of multiple layers of dynamically edited stock footage, accompanied by music reminiscent of video game soundtracks. The melancholic atmosphere is built from hundreds of short stock video clips representing scenes from human life – business meetings, leisure in nature, group therapy, marriage, loneliness, and crime. These highly constructed and often implausible scenarios raise questions about the very idea of life as we know it, presenting a subtle critique of the Western notion of life as illusion.
The New Sun, 2017, 12’19”
This animated video features a child-faced star with a beautiful voice: the Sun. Through a half-chanted, poetic monologue directed at its human lover, the Sun offers an unsettling and gloomy vision of a collapsing world where the only enduring element is language. The Sun’s monologue weaves together shifts in style and tone – from elevated and emotionally-charged confessions to goofy stand-up comedy – and culminates in a rendition of I Got Love, a song from the 1970 musical Purlie. The work leaves space for hope, affirming the power of words as instruments of social responsibility.
My Little Planet, 2016, 7’57”
This film presents an allegorical tale of a society in which time is measured by the orbit of discarded everyday objects – such as a Marlboro butt, a bottle cap, and a sticking plaster. Through humour and irony, the narrator describes the conventionality and arbitrariness of norms that govern collective life.
Future Days, 2013, 29’30”
Combining elements of animation and images shot on the Swedish island of Gotland, Future Days imagines a ludicrous yet melancholic afterlife for artists. In this fictitious realm, figures from the twentieth-century art world – such as. Lee Lozano, Charlotte Posenenske, Bas Jan Ader – convene alongside overlooked Polish artists and theorists, Włodzimierz Borowski and Jerzy Ludwiński. Actors wearing masks in the likeness of these figures speak in dialogue composed of actual quotes from their real-life counterparts.. Their eerie encounter in a phantasmal landscape leads to meditations on the human yearning for the sublime and on art‘s inability to effect social change.
Screening Information:
The film programme begins at 11:00 am and runs throughout the day, with new cycles starting at 12:30 pm, 2:00 pm, 3:30 pm, and 5:00 pm. Each cycle lasts approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Entrance is with a visitor’s ticket. Purchase here. With this ticket you will also be able to visit the exhibition ‘Breaking the Joints’, which features Agnieszka Polska’s video work ‘Correction Exercises’ (2008).
