Distorted Session 2: Focus on Poland

The House of Arts invites you to meet Polish filmmaker and video artist Józef Robakowski as part of the exhibition "Distorted Image. Chapters from the Beginnings of Video Art". The event takes place on Wednesday, May 27 at 5:00 PM at the House of Arts on Malinovského náměstí in Brno and includes a guided tour and discussion with the artist about the transformations of Polish art and society, as well as his own work.

Robakowski will present two cycles: "Żywa Galeria 1" (1975, 20 min.) and "Żywa Galeria 2" (2025, 20 min.). In the first series from 1975, he invited artists from the Polish neo-avant-garde to perform their own action in front of the camera in one and a half minutes. He applied the same formula fifty years later – this time with nineteen younger-generation authors from the multimedia field.

The exhibition itself (exhibition architecture: Kateřina Radakulan) explores the beginnings of video art in the former Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s. It includes experimental films, performance recordings, early animations, and independent video magazines distributed on cassettes – including Original Videojournal, Videomagazín Vokna, Videomagazín Karla Kyncla, and Infermental. The exhibition also features various forms of video installations and video sculptures, many of which have survived only in documentation.