Anna Molska
04 Mar - 25 Apr 2013
ANNA MOLSKA
The Sixth Continent
4 March - 25 April 2013
The Sixth Continent is a journey to the southern edge of the world: the mysterious still not fully explored Antarctica. Anna Molska engages with the history of expeditions organized by Polish scientists in the 1950s and 60s. One of the participants was the artist's grandfather, Physics professor Janusz Molski. The research material gathered by her grandfather over the course of several months of traveling - accounts of participants of the expeditions, photographs, slides, drawings and fragments of documentary films - inspired Molska to create her own vision of this hermetic extraordinary territory. The artist meanders along the margins of stories conceived from popular travel and science literature of the post-war time. At the end of an intense process of transformation Molska created a complex filmic tableau confronting documentary footage with new film sequences generating a synthetic experimental narrative. This central film installation is flanked by a monumental sculpture composed entirely of glass and giving shelter to a symbolic 'co-traveler', - an allegorical mascot as a residue of the story.
Molska's project engages with emotional and social processes set free in extreme environmental conditions as well as with the structures of memory. Her attention was drawn to the experiences of a group of polar explorers who were enclosed in the claustrophobic space of a research station. In Molska's new work the 'cold embrace' of the Sixth Continent becomes an intensifier of epic dimension, an extreme condition that focuses in on all perspectives: existential, inter-relational, cultural. The circle is completed by the Cold War context of the polar expeditions, which drives the underlying political iconography of the The Sixth Continent.
The Sixth Continent
4 March - 25 April 2013
The Sixth Continent is a journey to the southern edge of the world: the mysterious still not fully explored Antarctica. Anna Molska engages with the history of expeditions organized by Polish scientists in the 1950s and 60s. One of the participants was the artist's grandfather, Physics professor Janusz Molski. The research material gathered by her grandfather over the course of several months of traveling - accounts of participants of the expeditions, photographs, slides, drawings and fragments of documentary films - inspired Molska to create her own vision of this hermetic extraordinary territory. The artist meanders along the margins of stories conceived from popular travel and science literature of the post-war time. At the end of an intense process of transformation Molska created a complex filmic tableau confronting documentary footage with new film sequences generating a synthetic experimental narrative. This central film installation is flanked by a monumental sculpture composed entirely of glass and giving shelter to a symbolic 'co-traveler', - an allegorical mascot as a residue of the story.
Molska's project engages with emotional and social processes set free in extreme environmental conditions as well as with the structures of memory. Her attention was drawn to the experiences of a group of polar explorers who were enclosed in the claustrophobic space of a research station. In Molska's new work the 'cold embrace' of the Sixth Continent becomes an intensifier of epic dimension, an extreme condition that focuses in on all perspectives: existential, inter-relational, cultural. The circle is completed by the Cold War context of the polar expeditions, which drives the underlying political iconography of the The Sixth Continent.