Blue screen is a post-production technique that allows image manipulation. By using an even, blue background, the camera-recorded action can be transferred to completely different scenery. In his performance, Przemek Kamiński refers to the cultural history of the colour blue, approaching it through the prism of the ancient Greek term pharmakon, meaning medicine, poison, and something that must be sacrificed. The artist creates a series of vertical landscapes, in which a body irradiated by the colour moves between the visible and the imagined. The first and second plan, as well as viewers’ fantasies, blend into each other, while the identity is negotiated along and across the surface of the screen.

photos: Maciej Zakrzewski for Art Stations Foundation by Grażyna Kulczyk

Pharmakon (it radiates)

Emotionally overloaded forms circulate online and offline sculpting the surface of our bodies and identities. In ﻿So Emotional two performers hidden behind white theatrical masks inhabit images of ecstasy and despair, anger and fear to explore historical and contemporary forms of emotions and the emotionality of the form itself. While shadowing each other, they browse through artworks, memes, gifs, scenes from film and music videos. They hack them, pile them up and set them in motion to consider the body’s ability to act, resist and transform individually and collectively.

If the body is a battleground and affect is a new frontier of political struggle, how can we prepare for it? And how can we cultivate micro resistance trapped in a never-ending chain of repetition and appropriation?

photos: Katarzyna Szugajew

So Emotional

THEREAFTER is a pseudo-documentary film that captures two protagonists dwelling in the imaginary landscape. It is speculation about a place that exists in a parallel universe, in a distant future, long after contemporary society has collapsed. While wandering, roaming and manoeuvring therein, they experience a series of phantasmic encounters. They gradually discover features of the landscape and commit to a place where green is greener than ever before.

THEREAFTER

Blue (ribbon dance) is a monochromatic choreography - a choreography reduced to, produced by and related to one colour. Blue becomes here a primary quality of an embodied experience as well as a strategy for contemplation and poetic reflection - a reverie of love, grief and loss. The performer moves against a dense soundtrack, which comprises reflections on the history of the colour as well as a personal narrative, letting the blue movement leak out from within his body.

"Why blue? People ask me this question often. We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose."
Maggie Nelson "Bluets"

Photos: Marta Ankiersztejn for Institute of Music and Dance

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Pshemek Kaminski