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Perfect Lives

Agnieszka Polska

Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna

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Title
Perfect Lives
Gallery
Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna
Year
2019
Duration
10 min
Format & Technical

HD video.

In her new film Perfect Lives, Agnieszka Polska reflects on a 1990 control experiment, which took place when Galileo spacecraft was passing Earth on its way to Jupiter. In the experiment, scientists wanted to determine if data sent from Galileo will confirm the existence of life on Earth. The film is constructed as a dense, hypnotic essay, where dynamically edited multiple layers of stock footage and music composed in similarity to game music create a melancholic atmosphere. The material used to create this poetic collage is a collection of hundreds of short stock videos presenting various scenes from human life and covering a number of themes, such as: business meetings, enjoying nature, group therapy, marriage, loneliness, crime. These highly artificial and unlikely situations seem to question the very existence of life: they are the evidence for the western idea of life being an illusion.

Stills

Still
Still

Agnieszka Polska

Artist

1985, Lublin

Agnieszka Polska

Agnieszka Polska’s work is an exploration of the relation between art and politics, between artistic agency and the larger socio-political context which influences the production of art. Her work asks questions about the possibility of poetic actions and social transformation through art and culture, in times of political turmoil and social unrest. Polska, who lives and works in Warsaw, recently had solo exhibitions at The Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin during Berliner Festspiele, the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin, the Project Arts Center in Dublin, the National Art Gallery in Prague, as well as the New Museum and MoMa in New York.

Last update: October 15th, 2019.