The work’s title spans from video to film tape (a historical optical carrier) to the overall notion designating all ways and devices the human employs to go beyond the readily available instruments of the body – the hand and the eye. This sequence reverses the history of recording the moving picture.

Józef Robakowski, an artist as avant-garde as he is universal, has united several signature facets of his artistic practice in this singular installation into one cohesive object.

In a performance realized during WRO: Polish Monitor Festival, Piotr/Peter gives physical value to the completely immaterial concept of a drop-out, which, defined by the videotape technology, is a lack of small fragment in the picture, a hole visible as a torn part of the film frame or slightly defected picture.

A defect caused by an accidental magnetic glitch on video tape visible as a drop-out effect in the performance is effected by using a needle, with which the artist, wrapped with the tape, makes holes in the tape and his body. Before the artist wraps himself with the tape taken out of a cassette, he uses a camcorder to film a close-up of his torso and head in a self-portrait recording, with the camera in his spinning hand. The pierced tape with the traces of stigmatic drops of blood is returned to the cassette and carefully locked by the artist.

The defective tape as an original object becomes not merely a material medium for an electronic recording of a picture but a contemporary relic, a mixture of the symbolic and the sensual material with a vague status of the original, impossible to reproduce even in the age of seemingly universal and infinite mechanical reproduction. Peter Style questions the status of the copy, but the original is defective. The act of performance in a TV studio is being registered; the moment of performance is registered with television cameras on tapes recorded a dozen years before, and a torn fraction can also be seen. Technology and tools in their autonomic relation in the presence of body/reality are subjected to the destruction process set in the moment of the embodiment of the artist’s will or became aware because of his will.

Text: Violetta Kutlubasis-Krajewska, 2008

Władysław Kaźmierczak’s action Crash was the first performance broadcast live on public television in Poland. The very fact of direct transmission, by the way, belongs to the intrinsic nature of this work, broadcast at a time when evening news was presented on other channels. More and more television stations are appearing in Poland, and with them, viewers are jumping from channel to channel.

The situation of personal danger of the artist trying to descend from the wobbly structure and thus leave the public space of the TV studio is mounted alternately with the absurd intervention of the police, recorded by reporters, pacifying a spontaneous demonstration of young people welcoming the first day of spring. Kaźmierczak’s action peculiarly mixes the artist’s gesture with the informational sphere.

The language of television is already new; the propaganda newspeak of the previous period has long since given way to the exposure of images of violence and rape so typical of contemporary news. The mentality of the police, on the other hand, is still unpolished; after several years of transformation, the police do not know how to react: the old way or the new way.

The video installation consists of two large-scale sculptures, rag dolls equipped with human heads, which start a dialogue with each other. They chatter, have a banal-intellectual conversation, and sometimes argue about the meaning of existence.

The documentation is part of the WRO Monitor Poland exhibition in the TVP studio in Wroclaw. Fragments of the conversation are broadcast live on the TV program.

In this spatial installation, the artist explores the boundaries between reality and media reality, using a television screen as an image source. The work is based on simple formal means but creates a visually striking composition.

The pulsating image from the TV monitor is reflected in dozens of small mirrors that scatter it into fragments. Interestingly, the TV set is turned away from the viewer, making the image mediated and unreal, and the monitor’s role is reduced solely to a source of pulsating light.

The show premiered during the WRO Monitor Poland festival. The work is currently in Warsaw’s Zachęta Gallery’s collection.

An excerpt from a TV program in which the artist narrates his video installation, which depicts an excerpt from a TV news which image is mostly blacked out. Only two small windows cut out of the entire screen remain visible, which are then transmitted by two cameras to another two screens.

As the artist says, the work alludes to selectivity, a trait of every person making choices, of an artist choosing a subject and material to depict, or of a television program in which we always see only a slice of reality. Covering and censoring the TV material at the same time allows viewers to activate their imagination, which, when watching the full picture, can be turned off.

The artist, employing his pioneering audiovisual improvisation program, performs a live piece on an Amiga 2000 computer. This innovative software generates music and images in real time.

The performance, part of the WRO Polish Monitor video art festival, was broadcast live from the Polish Television studio on the TVP2 channel.

Video installation in public space, in front of the BWA Awangarda gallery building. It consists of a structure resembling a large, vertical aquarium, in which a TV box floats up and down, with the filmed performer Jarosław Knabel inside.

The title refers to the Latin phrase meaning ‘from egg to apples’ or ‘from beginning to end’.

The documentation shows a concert by double bassist Tadeusz Wielecki in the surroundings of this installation.

A box television emits a silvery light, its glow reflected in a crescent-shaped mirror suspended high above.

This installation evokes the romantic allure of emerging technologies while simultaneously foreshadowing their role in perpetuating bourgeois values, consumerism, monotony, and a sense of aimlessness.

This is one of the epitaphs created by Józef Robakowski between 1966 and 1994. The installation consists of a metal structure with a crafted deer head connected to a glowing light bulb and a television with a video recording showing the artist lying down with deer antlers, smoking a cigarette.

As the artist said:
Some time ago, I devoted my first epitaph to ‘Jan Gnat’ – a sepulchral board with a man’s torso painted on it. It also had an animal tibia instead of the head — II International Exhibition of the Artistic Society ‘Krąg’, Regional Museum, Toruń 1967. In my intention, the epitaph was to depict the faith of a man who is already terrified, a corpse deprived of artistic energy. It was a symbol of some unavoidable and, but also an announcement of new, creative, even more intensive force, a transformation into a completely new possibility. Today, after almost thirty years, a new epitaph appears. This time, it is ‘Mr. Deer’ to personify the inclination to our arrogant gestures. It is to dispose of the sorry fate of a modern artist as a naive clown, a cocksucker, the creator of beautiful ideas and things…

PS The hunter who sold me the trophies claimed that it had been the most beautiful deer in the herd, the most vital and sumptuous (Haupthirsch). He wanted to get him at any cost. He was very excited when he told me that he had approached the deer over a dozen times until he managed to kill the beautiful animal with one shot from a golden sporting rifle right between the eyes.

The Hidden Decade is a long-term research/publishing/curatorial project undertaken by the WRO Art Center.

It focuses on collecting, compiling, and sharing Polish works created using video and early digital techniques in the years 1985-1995.

This era started with individual explorations by a few scattered artists using a new medium, the electronic image, outside the boundaries of the established art institutions of their day, and it ended with video art being recognized as a major field of contemporary fine arts.

The documentation presents the first installment of the collection assembled by WRO – an exhibition at the National Museum in Wroclaw during the WRO 09 Biennale.

The project featured not only a selection of tapes but also objects and video installations, showcasing archival works in an updated exhibition format.