Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Light and Shadow

Our selection is comprised in part of prize-winning Polish works from the international WRO 89 Sound Basis Visual Art Festival. The first two are responsible to the requirements of the Festival's Main Competition, which called for the production of video works on the basis of a specific musical composition - in last year's festival, a 1960s work by the late polish jazzman Krystof Komeda: by coincidence, both the selected works use the compositions twice.

Jan Brzuszek's "Dokad prowadzi ta droga" ("Where does this Road Lead") won the first prize in the competition. Komeda's music provides a surprisingly natural structure for the "narrative" of the tale as well as for its climax. The transition from the abstract to the concrete from, along with the combination of analytic thought and humourus story, takes on the force of a philosophical treatise.

Rafael Boguslawski, whose works "0" won the second prize in the Competition, presents a composition of international and external black and light as interpreted though camara stuated inside a huge pipe. The contrast between two works inspired by the same sound track, besides providing a virtually "text book" look at the coordination of sound and image in the creation of a video art form, also highlights the differences in artistic stances oscillating between performance and perception.

The next two works by Polish artists were awarded in the WRO 89 Open Competition. "RAJ 69" by Miroslaw Emil Koch, is a work that arose from the artist's fascination with the music of the Kormorans, an avant-garde group based in Wroclawn. The Film, which is characteristic of one school of Polish video art, is based on material filmed with a super-8 camara, assembled and then re-recorded on video cassete, and finally reworked by typical video methods. Krzysztof Skarbek is a painter who also frequently finds expressions through paratheatrical and musical activities. "Nasz beton Aront" ("Our Concrete Aront") is a synthesis of these fields of interest. This initially analitycal "medialimesque" attempt to describe a given actually-existing landscape, and its nearly graphic interpretation, metamorphoses into the characterstically New Expressionist camera work of the artist, who arranges the sequences of a situation from an association of concrete tripods with primitive totems.

We would like to pay special note to Miroslaw Amil Koch's works, "Mane Tekel Fares" and "Kormorany". "Mane Tekel Fares" is the joint work of three artists - Miroslaw Koch, Wojciech Maria Wojcik, Jacek Ponton Jankowski - along with the musicians and performers of The Kormorans. What they have created is a multip hase, not-easily-categorizable attempt at an artistic dialog with history, in search of thought forms putatively preserved in the space and matter of the quarries - the tragic site of the forced labor and extermination of prisioners during World War II. The music and "sensitive presence" is intended to surrender to the energy of the place, to let itself be shaped and recorded on tape. The film is the final step of a larger undertaking; its not a documentary, but rather an effort to plumb an essence through the multiple-stage reworking of a video tape.

"Kormorany" ("The Kormarans"), in the form we are presenting it, is a condensation of five years of the artist's documentation of his collaborative activities with The Kormorans. It is comprised of two main sequences: images improvised live to the music at a concert held at a train station waiting room, and unexpected activities of the fire brigade lured by smoke escaping from the basement during other performances. Between Koch's works, to offer a constrast and change of a mood, we are offering the film work of another artist; "Boguslaw Schaffer"  is a film born of confrontation of personalities: that of Malgorzata Potocka - author, director and producer os films, video works and concerts and that of Boguslaw Schaffer - a contemporary musical classic, composer, author of theoretical texts and plays that offer an insidious commentary on the ambivalent role of the artists, contemporary art and art theory.

8th Fotoptica Internacional Video Festival. 09 a 15 de Novembro de 1990. p. 71. e p. 72.