Anna Konik, 14 November - 4 December 2016

Fluffy Clouds Sailing above our Heads

A film project completed by Anna Konik in cooperation with the POLIN Museum is dedicated to her hometown – Dobrodzień. It was an attempt to record the history and experiences of the Jewish community, persons displaced from the eastern borderlands (former Polish territory in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine), as well as members of the German minority, all of whom make up the identity of this town.

The intricate stories of people, places and events are still awaiting discovery, lurking within the isolated community that is the town of Dobrodzień. Jews, Poles and Germans all share their respective identities, some of them having lived in Dobrodzień since time immemorial, while others have experienced the violence of forced relocation, have fled the town, or have been deported.

The artist revisits her hometown and its residents. In her story she analyses the town’s social fabric, old photographs, archival press publications and oral history. All of these sources bear witness to the lives of the people of Dobrodzień and to the identity of all those who lived here before World War II, during the war itself, in the communist era and today. The artist wishes to extract these stories from the available sources, building a history out of complementary micro-narratives. It is a story of different generations, of the fates of people concealed within architecture and nature, within silence and decay. Even the very words “dzień dobry” (“good day”) from which the town takes its name allow the artist to glean the essence of its history.

Cinematography: Jędrzej Niestrój
 
Konik's residency in the Museum ended with an open meeting moderated by Dr. Roma Sendyka from the Department of Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Jagiellonian University.

More about the artist

Anna Konik’s artistic output includes video installations, photographs and drawings. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw under Krzysztof M. Bednarski and Prof. Grzegorz Kowalski, defending her thesis in 2000. In 2012, she was awarded the degree of Doctor of Fine Arts, graduating from the Department of Media Art and Stage Design of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 2009, she was nominated to Deutsche Bank's "Spojrzenia 2009" award and the Paszport Polityki (Polityka's Passport) award. She was a visiting lecturer at Bielefeld University, Humboldt University of Berlin, Sommerakademie in Salzburg and theUniversity of Arts in Poznań. She received numerous artistic and research scholarships, while her works have been exhibited all over the world, forming part of both private and public art collections such as the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok and the Leube Foundation Art Collection in Gartenau-Salzburg.

For more information please visit www.annakonik.art.pl

 

>> Learn more about artist-in-residence programmes

The activity “Open Museum – Education in Action” is carried out within the project “Jewish Cultural Heritage”, component “Faces of Diversity”. Supported from the Norway and EEA Grants by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.

www.eeagrants.org, www.norwaygrants.org
More about "Jewish Cultural Heritage" project

The film of Anna Konik has been also supported by the Culture and Sports Centre in Dobrodzień and by the Goethe Institute.