Agnieszka Polska

Agnieszka Polska (b. 1985, Lublin, Poland) lives and works in Berlin. Agnieszka Polska makes video works that transpose found footage. She'll often animate or heighten the existing imagery, altering the primary context, investigating the limits and impacts of documentation on its future reception.

Polska is one of the youngest members of a generation of Polish artists—including Maria Loboda and Goshka Macuga—who have come of age in recent decades and share an impulse not only to reexamine the lost legacies of their country’s neo-avant-garde but also to locate those legacies (and themselves) within the broader trajectories of contemporary art from Western Europe and North America. That this is a project undertaken as well by Polish critics and curators undoubtedly helps account for the richness of these artists’ engagements with history.

- Written by Tom McDonough for Artforum, 2014

Foam squares cocoon our bodies as we gasp the last breath of the Permian era—the geological period that witnessed the largest mass extinction. The video fabulates a primordial genesis that queries, “Mass extinctions, what’s that? Everyone has to die. What’s your point of reference? Are you floating or falling?” Gazing up at the slanted screen, the unhappiest thought of death is strangely approachable. Perhaps these soft spaces embody yet another quantum reality—the uncertainty principle, which theorises the impossibility of knowing both the position or velocity of an object, rendering much of scientific specificity virtually inconceivable.

- Written by Laurel V. McLaughlin for This is Tomorrow, 2020

Recent exhibitions include: The Thousand-Year Plan, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2021), The Demon’s Brain, Gdansk City Gallery, Gdansk (2020), Lovebite, Frye, Seattle (2020), The New Sun, Heidi Museum, Melbourne (2020), The Burrow, Neuer Kunstverein, Vienna (2019), Little Planet, Overduin & c.o., Los Angeles (2017), Little Planet, Overduin & c.o., Los Angeles (2014)