Mariusz Wilczyński’s exhibition centres around one film – the full-length debut of this well-known animator titled Kill It and Leave This Town. Originally envisaged as a short film, the animation took 14 years to complete. Finally, a full-length film was made, which represents the artist’s journey through the land of memories, with recurring motifs of people and places close to him. The animator’s home town Łódź provides the backdrop for this surreal story while the characters are real, imagined, or taken from literature. The exhibition Kill It... at the Zachęta is primarily built around the contexts that make up the world presented in the film and the work itself. On the one hand, they are defined by the visual dimension (multi-plane city scenery, different light as compared to the director’s earlier films), which is shown at the exhibition through original drawings and animated set design. On the other hand, it is expressed by Wilczyński’s total thinking about sound as an important building block of film space. The third important element of the exhibition are the scenes that were not included in the film’s final version film – voiced and edited at the animatic stage, showing the planned character animation in a simplified form, which enables the viewers to get a glimpse of the technique used by contemporary animators.

guide: Sara Herczyńska