metropolis m

With remarkable simplicity, she captures the cultural and personal values of current Polish society on video.Against a blue sky, a girl in a white dress is dancing to a jerky hip-hop rhythm. The wind blows through her hair, giving her silent choreography an air of lightness. I reach for the headphones next to the monitor and in a moment, without losing any of its graceful simplicity, the image radically changes its meaning. My ears are now full of the sound of church bells. This familiar sound provides the girl on screen with a beat she seamlessly incorporates into the movement of her body. The title of this four-minute-long film is Bia?ysto?? (Whitishness, 2010), a word play that refers to the setting and its particular ambiance. This is the Polish city of Bia?ystok – the city on the White River, 200 kilometres northeast of Warsaw. This is where Milena Korolczuk is from. After finishing her studies in Pozna?, the artist (b. 1984) divides her time today between her native Podlasie region and California. Her work, mostly photographs and films, cleverly combines the natural, visceral rhythm of life with its roots in culture. On a cold morning, the hero of the film Dawid (2011) makes his way to a soc-modernist housing estate in Bia?ystok with his electric guitar, where he will – at the behest of the artist – play a wake-up tune for the locals. He’s wearing headphones connected to a device on his chest. Dawid plays the guitar to the rhythm of his own heart. Zegar (Clockwork, 2011) is another hypnotic recording, a twenty-minute film depicting a group of young East Orthodox choir girls who, dressed in their everyday clothes, mimic the ticking of a clock in song. A choir without religious pomp, without robes, psalms. Their song is both beautiful and terrifying, a tautological register of passing time, in a plain white room. Under a surface calm, Korolczuk’s films hold an underlying disquiet, of empty space, of ticking time. In Polish, when we feel that something special is about to happen, we say that there is ‘something in the air’. The expression is fitting in describing this artist’s works. Air is, in fact, one of the key players here, as in the large-scale photographs of the sky above Bia?ystok or the dusky photos of teenagers hiding out with beers under Zab?udów’s small-town cover of night. It is the air that carries sound and music, creating a sense of space, room to breathe, an immaterial impression of a given place and circumstance. My first time seeing Korolczuk’s works – the very first was Bia?ysto?? – I was seduced by the artist’s ease and precision. Here was an artist who represented a new generation, raised after the ecstatic events of 1989, an artist who was describing changes my generation could hardly measure. A basic concept that has not yet been translated into the language of art is the constant presence of the church in public and private life in Poland. It’s remarkable that so few artists have found the means to say something on the subject. Korolczuk’s film unexpectedly offers a suggestive answer to the question. Paradoxically, religion in this country, where 95% of its citizens declare allegiance to the Roman-Catholic church and 92% consider themselves faithful, is everywhere, but nearly always out of sight. This ethereal, hip-hop choreography set to the tune of church bells is perhaps the most incisive work that has come about on the subject. It shows us what is in the air we breathe even when it’s too close for us to give it a thorough, rational appraisal. Cutting off the flow of air is lethal. Milena Korolczuk has striking intuition and a talent for creating concise images and content. Her films require no speech, their heroes are typically young people, often friends of the artist, often artists themselves, all of whom appear sincere in whatever it is that they do, organically composed within the space we observe them in. This is expressed in how she engages her protagonists, captures their image and records their actions. Their passions imperceptibly become an element of our own identities. The musical rhythms pervading Milena’s works blend in with the beat of our pulse. By the same token, nostalgia is brought into a new, biological realm. ?ukasz Gorczyca is co-director of Raster Gallery, Warsaw