Documentation of ‘Platos Schatten’ realised by the WRO team during the first public presentation of the work at the Multimediale 4 festival in Karlsruhe in May 1995. Documentation of the work ‘Floating Identities’ (the name of the installation has changed) realised by the WRO team during the Multimediale 5 festival in Karlsruhe in October 1997. Ten steel figures holding cathode ray tubes without enclosures in their hands. The screens thus exposed display anatomical drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, an image of Muhammad Ali, documentation of a space rocket launch, Salvador Dali’s ‘Andalusian Dog’ and others. Between sequences, the figure of a dancer appears. He jumps in place, higher and higher. The sequence slows down, making the figure seem to float in the air. The human body realises one of humanity’s most primal dreams – flight. ‘Platos Schatten’ (later “Floating Identities”) blurs the boundaries between exhibit, museum, narrative and database. An erudite work of art that is an attempt to build a new museum strategy, to construct a new model of serving visual material as a base for the viewer’s perception.

Seeing the world overlaps with comprehending the world, with things located beyond the horizon of our gaze relegated into inconsequentiality. However, as the operations of the world take place even at the molecular level, a multitude of histories remain unperceived and untold. These oh-so-human tendencies were addressed by Sara Kolster and Derek Holzer at the WRO Biennale in 2005. In their ResonanCITY, they put together a visual collage composed of images of images. As photosensitive tapes showed reflections of images of various place, the tapes themselves also combined into an image of their own as material carriers. As a result, images of various ontic status could be blended, which sensitized the audience to alternative ways of perceiving the reality.

In Living Stereo, Brian Mackern crafted a dynamic audiovisual performance using sound synthesis, coding, and digital tools. Inspired by Latin American culture and urban landscapes, he combined sound fragments and visual elements, introducing randomness to explore boundaries between control and chaos. Through glitch aesthetics, Mackern’s work emphasized real-time creation and the unpredictable nature of digital media. This immersive experience engaged audiences in a reflection on the layered complexity of digital culture and multimedia art forms.

The work combines traditional analog film techniques with an experimental approach to image creation, focusing on exploring the limits of visual perception. The installation involved visual blurring and deconstruction of images, as the artists investigated the concept of the “blind spot”—both literally, in reference to the biology of the eye, and metaphorically, emphasizing the limitations of human vision and visual technology. Le Point Aveugle aimed to confront viewers with what lies beyond the boundaries of perception and awareness, inviting reflection on media in the age of digitization, when analog film art was beginning to fade from prominence.

This unusual installation conveying 20th-century cultural content, trends and motifs associated with multiple portraits. The most famous multiple portraits include Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 portrait; Witkacy’s portrait created in St. Petersburg in 1915 or 1916; and the 1912 portrait of Wacław Szpakowski, a Wrocław-based artist who influenced local conceptual artists. Multiple portraits have also been a recurring motif in the work of a number of other artists. Józef Robakowski’s created his own multiple self-portrait in video in 1998; and the camera plays the role of a mirror in many contemporary artists’ performances.

A mirrored cabinet for viewing video works including:

Józef Robakowski, Light Checks [1, 2, 3, 4…], 03:00, 1993 from the collections of the WRO Art Center and the Exchange Gallery

Nam June Paik, Selfportrait, 1961 and Head, 1982 a film by Wolfgang Ramsbott, from a private collection, Bremen / documentation of the WRO Art Center exhibition Driving Media

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, portraits and self-portraits from the 1930s from the collection of Ewa Franczak and Stefan Okołowicz

The literary original of Chansons de Geste (Songs of heroic deeds/Songs of gestures) consists of a collection of the Old French narrative poems apotheosizing the heroic chivalric deeds. Chansons de Geste by Karolina Freino include a documentation material portraying / depicting politicians of the past century, while delivering a speech important for the history of the 20th century. The gesticulation of the political leaders has been transcribed — by means of the Thereminvox — into the musical passages. Thus, the evident choreography of gestures composes thus an audiovisual Chansons de Geste, becoming a song on the history, and delivering an epic portrait of power.

The work was carried out within the framework of the scholarship granted by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland in 2012.

The list of chosen speeches:

1. VLADIMIR LENIN, 19.07.1920, Tauride Palace, Saint Petersburg.

2. MAHATMA GANDHI, 10.12.1931, Victoria Hall, Geneva.

3. ADOLF HITLER, 10.02.1933, Sportpalast, Berlin.

4. BENITO MUSSOLINI, 7.09.1934, Palazzo del Goveno, Taranto.

5. JOSEF STALIN, 17.11.1935, Kremlin, Moscow.

6. NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, 30.09.1938, Heston Aerodrome, Heston.

7. WINSTON CHURCHILL, 5.03.1946, Westminster College, Fulton.

8. MAO ZEDONG, 1.10.1949, Tiananmen Square, Beijing.

9. NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV, 12.10.1960, UN Headquarters, New York.

10. CHARLES DE GAULLE, 15.05.1962, The Elysee Palace, Paris.

11. JOHN KENNEDY, 26.06.1963, Rudolph Wilde Platz, Berlin.

12. MARTIN LUTHER KING, 28.08.1963, Lincoln Memorial, Washington.

13. WŁADYSŁAW GOMUŁKA, 19.03.1968, Congress Hall, Warsaw.

14. FIDEL CASTRO, 22.12.1975, Havana.

15. JOHN PAUL II, 2.06.1979, Zwycięstwa (Piłsudskiego) Square, Warsaw.

16. LECH WAŁĘSA, 31.08.1980, Gdańsk Shipyard, Gdańsk.

17. WOJCIECH JARUZELSKI, 13.12.1981, TVP Studio, Warsaw.

18. NELSON MANDELA, 11.02.1990, Town—hall, Cape Town.

Collaboration: Radomir Piorun (movement), Cezary Duchnowski (sound), Inga Leśniewska (historical consultation)

A video footage taken on mobile phones by Syrian civilians during the ongoing revolution. In what has been described as a ‘double shooting’, civilians shoot at army snipers with their phone cameras in an attempt to bear witness and hold the snipers to account by posting their actions on the web. Rabih Mroué has culled images from You Tube, then zooms in to scrutinise snipers features, only to see them pixelate into abstraction the closer he searches for their identity. Alongside film footage and photography, Mroué gives a lecture that delves into the many issues surrounding the Syrian protestors’ recording of their own reality for the rest of the world to see. Rabih Mroué plays out the role of selector, interpreter and commentator as he attempts to further understand these double shootings.

The exhibition reveals an artist who is an experimentalist, an activist who is unpredictable and capable at any moment of anti-system mockery or mimicry propaganda based on shamelessly pop-cultural patterns, as well as of a (full-blooded) frontal attack.

From the collected video works, documents and photographs, a multi-faceted image of Kantor emerges, including as a disinterested benefactor who marks an X on the walls of museums with his own blood from test tubes smashed in moments of institutional inattention by the system and its functionaries. Incidentally, such moments are becoming increasingly difficult to come by, as Kantor’s appearance immediately heightens the vigilance of the security services of the world’s museums. For he poses questions within the walls of institutional art: what is the difference between legal and illegal performance, what is the value of an unwanted work, what is freedom and what is vandalism.

By conducting guerrilla warfare within the realm of politics, Kantor appears as a strategist, ideologue and usurper, in a word the First Neoist, like Mao, or another cult figure captured by the revolutionary counterculture – Che, speaking on behalf of the oppressed.

Finally, the exhibition offers a set of revolutionary songs and images in which the artist performs as pop culture star Monty Cantsin: open-pop-star. His phenomenon lies in the fact that the more he dissolves his charisma into a collective identity – because, according to the philosophy of this project, anyone can call themselves Monty Cantsin – the more precisely Istvan Kantor turns out to be the clearest Monty. He achieves similar results in his fight against art institutions – the more he is rejected and harassed by them, the more they work on his reputation and visibility.

Among the arsenal of means are also the machines the artist uses for performances, video operas and technological orgies, for 35 years fighting with these means on all fronts against his greatest enemies: broadcast imperialism, elitism, gentrification and everything that devours our authenticity. Kantor combines artistic disobedience with civil disobedience, fighting, for example, the rentagon (a nightmarish power equal to that of the Pentagon, the owners and managers of buildings, charging for the roof over our heads and regulating our private lives and behaviour).

It questions the institutional status of all values, as well as their personal, proprietary arsenal, caricaturing masculinism, sexism and the cleverness of martyrdom. The mockery of self-proclaimed martyrdom, pop-cultural glitz and political pathos, edginess and backlash is a weapon against the imperialism of the Transmission System and, more broadly, the corrective oppression of the system we live in – Kantor’s/Monty Cantsin’s greatest personal enemy.

Bjørn Erik Haugen’s installation is based on a piano transcription of a lecture by Jacques Lacan which was interrupted by an incident rather unusual in contemporary academia. As the famous theorist is delivering his talk, a student stages his own situationist revolt by splashing water on Lacan’s notes and throwing flour all over them as a protest against the psychoanalytical definition of reality. To convey the scene, Haugen relies on a grand piano, a deeply symbolically charged instrument which connotes patriarchy and the artistic aspirations of bourgeois culture.

Installation composed of blurred images reconstructed from original photographs owned by the mistress of Kraków concentration camp commander. Artist dresses up as Ruth. She recreates images setting up an anxious and quaint history of a woman who tried to lead a carefree life in the centre of hell and alongside a murderer.

The central theme of the exhibition is the use of found footage, the legitimisation of its appropriation, and the fascination with formal and semantic transformation in both aesthetic and emotional terms.

The eight used in the exhibition’s title refers directly to the 8mm and super8 film technique in which the original materials used as the basis for the exhibition were created years ago. The 8 is also an expression of the visual materiality of the film loop – a tape wound onto two reels that rotate in a film projector during projection. Finally, the overturned 8 becomes a symbol of infinity, and more specifically an expression of – as Igor Krenz puts it – ‘my long struggle with the loops of films shot before I took up art’. A struggle of which the exhibition ‘8:Blow-up’ is the current, but arguably not yet summarised, result… Where does footage come from? Here comes Jan Krenz, an outstanding composer and world-renowned conductor known for his pioneering performances of contemporary music and outstanding interpretations of the classics, as well as composer of music for films by Andrzej Munk and Andrzej Wajda, among others, from the Polish School period.

In 1963, Jan Krenz bought his first 8mm camera and started filming. After a few years, he acquired a technically improved super8 film camera.His films feature family, home, friends, situations taken from the world around him with musicians, filmmakers, writers and film notes from his numerous travels.‘Over the Baltic 63’, “Copenhagen 66”, “Montreux 67”, “Masuria 64”, ’Archive 77, 78’, ‘Japan 81’… The last tape dates from 1985, the year Jan Krenz acquired his first video camera.

In the exhibition, Jan Krenz is thus a co-author (hidden author) in his artistic incarnation of the amateur filmmaker, which is not widely known. On the basis of films shot by his father, Jan Krenz, using framing and zooming – just like the protagonist of ‘Zoom’ – but also extracting frames from moving shots, stopping them and then releasing the stabilised and abstracted ones again, he tries to reach the essence recorded in the image.

From the light-sensitive tapes extracted from the past, the visual syntheses presented in the exhibition were created by means of digitalisation, re-mastering and enlargement. Single freeze-frames in high magnification reveal less obvious fragments of shots, blur the reality of places and figures, and reveal second plans.