This fall, internationally acclaimed visual artist and film director Agnieszka Polska is coming to The Hague to fill 1646 with her immersive video works and installations.
In her work, Agnieszka Polska shuffles between different positions and perspectives, exploring the complexities of today’s technologised world. By shifting scale, her artworks turn into almost existential exercises: forms and ideas gain new meanings after being transferred to a different environment – what first looks like an incoherent noise can become crystal clear up close, or surprisingly simple from a distance.
Through a poetic voice – sometimes blunt, sometimes tender – Polska reflects on the contradictions of our time: our ability to experience normality and love while man-made catastrophes unfold; the tension between mortality, decay, and the indifference that infiltrates daily routines.
Travels in scale places the visitor back in the role of observer. What position do we take, as individuals and as a collective? And how does the way we look shape how we act?
Her first solo exhibition in The Netherlands, brings together the video works The New Sun and What the Sun Has Seen, both exploring the figure of a witness of the rapid societal changes. Alongside these, a new film shot during King’s Day in Amsterdam, reflects on the scale of the individual in relation to the collective, forming an “imagined community”.
In addition, Polska’s ongoing series Braudel’s Clocks (2022–ongoing) will be on view. These sculptural timepieces follow XX-century historian Fernand Braudel’s idea that unified time is a social construct, and the world is a complex set of structures evolving at various speeds.
The exhibition is made possible by the generous loan from the artist and Lombardi—Kargl.
Agnieszka Polska (b. 1985, Lublin, Poland) is a visual artist and film director based in Berlin. Polska employs computer-generated media to explore themes of individual agency, social responsibility, and the shaping of historical narratives within environments driven by rapid technological changes and the flow of information. Her work bridges the past and the digital present, using hallucinatory animations and poetic storytelling to delve into the ethical ambiguities of contemporary society.
Polska’s art has been showcased internationally, including exhibitions at the New Museum and MoMA in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London, and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. She has held solo exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, M HKA in Antwerp, Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Nottingham Contemporary, and Salzburger Kunstverein. She participated in the 57th Venice Biennale, 11th Gwangju Biennale, 19th and 24th Biennale of Sydney, 14th Shanghai Biennale, and 13th Istanbul Biennial. In 2017, she was awarded the Preis der Nationalgalerie.
