Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

opening: 2.09, 7 p.m.
curator: Marta Miś

The exhibition Bi-polar is the first such extensive presentation of the work of Jacek Malinowski in Zachęta. It presents a selection of the filmography of an artist who from 2000 has been realizing films in the style of fake documentaries. Over the course of over a decade Malinowski has developed his own, characteristic pseudo-documentary style that is an important element in his artistic “signature”. At the same time, the exhibition illustrates an ever deepening immersion of the artist into cinema genres, which he treats as a field of experiment and of formal explorations within the scope of the film medium. The title of the exhibition in a provocative way communicates the duality present in the artistic experiments made by Malinowski (a sculpture graduate from the Kowalnia circle at the Warsaw Academy of the Fine Arts, among his classmates were Katarzyna Kozyra, Artur Żmijewski, Paweł Althamer) exploring the borders between creation and reality, between fiction and documentary.

Emerging from Dziga Vertov’s theory of the cinematic eye, which understood that the “eye” of the camera is an objective and infallible source of the recognition of reality, the exhibition poses questions about the border between truth and fiction in the medium of film, about the influence of the form chosen by a director on the reception of his work and finally about the “reading” of genre formulas by viewers. The starting point for this narration is the trilogy made from 2000-2008 HalfAWoman, which to this day — despite the rising popularity of mockumentaries in cinema since the 1990s — provokes consternation in a section of the viewers who believe in the authenticity of the story presented by Jacek Malinowski. In the further films presented, the artist continues to play with the formula of the fake documentary: in The Celebration of Erwin Koloczek he ironically depicts the celebritization of contemporary culture, and in 2039 he creates a vision of the world of the future which makes joking reference to science fiction films. His last work, Nosferatu — The Fearful Dictator, is a film installation inspired by the classic horror films of F.W. Murnau (1922) and Werner Herzog (1979) which illustrates Malinowski’s original approach to remakes.

An integral part of the exhibition will be the accompanying programme that will situate Jacek Malinowski’s works in a wider cinematographic context. In the frame of this will be held at Zachęta the premiere of the artist’s newest film entitled Stain, a film which plays with conventions of disaster movies.