Anna Maria Łuczak
Trust Speakers
The exhibition Trust Speakers will present an installation by Anna Maria Łuczak, which will comprise of a video, a sculpture, and ready-made objects. The starting point of the project was footage from behind the scenes of a documentary film production, wherein the artist acted as a translator during interviews with Polish residents in the workers’ hotel Stella Maris, located in the town of Steenbergen, the south-western part of the Netherlands. The film was produced on the commission of a local television station in order to introduce natives the strangers. After Poland's accession to the European Union, their number began to grow exponentially, intensifying during particular periods of seasonal work, when Poles are employed, to work i.e. cultivating plants and vegetables. A significant part of the 60 hours of recorded conversations, conducted by the artist, was not used in the final version of the film.
In her installations, Łuczak takes on the subject of personal interpretation of historical events. Using film excerpts of interviews, discarded during the editing process, she attemptsto understand how, through the use of various types of archival and contemporary documentaries, as well as their subjective selection, a collective memory is built, along with mental shortcuts and simplifications. As a tool in her work, the artist often employs interviews with persons that represent an either public or symbolic role. The interview becomes the starting point and the model for creating a situation in which the classic roleof the author and subject are scattered and improvised. A situation orchestrated in such a way provides an opportunity to reflect on the status and significance of the archive, as well as the transformations which the memory is subject to. The artist often utilizes online archival materials in the form of photographs or films. Conversations with the representatives of culture – philosophers, film directors, actors, and writers – are alternating with amateur recordings, fragments of films or documentaries. The artists focuses on the way in which images circulate on the internet and also how their meanings change according to the context, or even the order of presentation. By combining video with spatial elements in an unconventional way – sculpture with ready-made objects – allows them to pass from a virtual space into the material world, and the viewer's non-linear way of interpreting her work.
