The material gathered over the course of a several month research – the accounts of participants in the expeditions, photographs, slides, drawings and fragments of documentary films – inspired Molska to create her own vision of the encounter with an unknown terrain. The artist meanders along the margins of stories known from the travel and popular science literature of the time. The effect of these investigations is an unexpected play with the space of the gallery, in which sculptures, installations and a three-channel video installation have been combined together in a  compositional whole.

The main narrative axis of the film is a dialogue between the organizer of several of the expeditions and one of the participants. The artist brings her observation to bear on a group of Polish polar explorers enclosed in the claustrophobic space of a research station. The extreme conditions of interpersonal relations are a pretext for a reflection on the side of human nature that leads people to give sense to existence through activities that on the surface are irrational and unnatural. The whole is completed by an underlining of the political context of the expedition.

Anna Molska’s project  takes on the question of whether the major factor in pushing such different people into the frozen embrace of the sixth continent is instinct, the necessary of discovery, a mistaken decision or simply chance.

The artist is realising this project under the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland scholarship.

In this video, use has been made of archival materials and films of Ryszard Czajkowski, Janusz Molski, Stanisław Rakusa-Suszczewski and Szymon Wdowiak.