West, London
Agnieszka Polska
The Book of Flowers
Union Pacific“What if what we believe is required of humans by nature is just a story that we told ourselves about what being human is and what nature is? What if who we think we are, what we believe at a gut level about our kinship loyalty and our perceived survival needs are responses to a story we made up and told ourselves was written by our genes?,” writes Alexis Pauline Gumbs on Sylvia Wynter. This “discursive construction of man” echoes in Agnieszka Polska’s film The Book of Flowers, where the main power and, at the same time, threat to humanity is becoming enchanted in one’s own story, whispered into a human ear by technological mouth. The Book of Flowers, itself constituting a sci-fi story, is designed as a “thought experiment” in immersion and dissociation. Agnieszka Polska (b. 1985, Lublin, Poland) uses cinematic storytelling and affective technologies to address the perpetually negotiated relationship between human and technology, examining the processes that mutually influence and legitimate this relationship in language, history and consciousness. She is interested in the question of individual social responsibility against the background of technology-driven disorientation and ideologies of technological determinism. Polska’s works combine historical research, cinematic storytelling and affective communication technologies, seeking new narrative formats at the intersection of poetry and narration, art and cinema, that correspond with the rapidly changing requirements of information-driven societies. Polska studied at the Faculty of Arts of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, at Faculty of Graphic Arts of Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, and in the class of Hito Steyerl at University of the Arts in Berlin. Her works are in the collections of: Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, PL, The ING Polish Art Foundation Collection, Warsaw, PL, dela.art collection, Warsaw, PL, Wrocław Contemporary Museum, Wrocław, PL, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, PL, Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR, and Art Collection Telekom, Bonn, DE. Selected solo exhibitions include: Flowers on the Sun, M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium (2024), The New Sun, Lawson Gallery, Perth, Australia (2024), A Bonobo Looks at a Butterfly, a Black Moon Eclipses the Sun, Dawid Radziszewski, Warsaw (2023), The Thousand-Year Plan, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2021), Perfect Lives, Union Pacific, London, UK (2020), The Burrow, Neuer Kunstverein, Vienna, Austria (2019) and The Demon’s Brain, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin, Germany (2018).