Anna Molska
5/09

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Anna Molska is a young Polish artist who broke into the art world as soon as she finished her studies with master-teacher Grzegorz Kowalski at the Fine Art Academy in Warsaw in 2008. Her performance - based video pieces show underlying sculptural concepts and include personal, contemporary responses to modernist art, especially the Russian avant-garde.

Molska received the prestigious scholarship for art and design from the Erasmus-Sokrates Academy in Stuttgart during her studies, and has already shown her work in both group shows and one-woman shows in notable art venues, including the Ursula Walbroel Gallery in Germany and the National Gallery of Art in Poland. She was also invited to participate in the Eastern European Residency Exchange, Art in General in New York City, New Films from Poland at the New Museum, New York, and at the fifth Berlin Biennale. She lives and works in Warsaw.
 
Molska stayed at the JCVA over May of 2009, when she toured the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv areas. She was particularly interested in the works of artist Pesach Slabosky at the Giveon Gallery, and consequently met with him several times. The dialogue between the two artists may well inspire her next project. Molska also attended a performance of Old Wives Tales at the Ensemble 209, Tel Aviv's most established performance space. During her stay, she met Curators who expressed serious interest in collaborating or showing her work in the near future.
Tangram


In this black and white video, two athletic young men wearing only ancient Greek-style helmets and loin cloths move seven large geometric cubes around, trying to form new geometric shapes. This mental effort, conducted in the physical realm, is Molska's reinterpretation of the ancient Chinese game the work is titled after.

At the video's start, one of the young men claims poetry and sculpture as his pursuits. At its end, after they lie down to rest, the other declares: I want to join the Polish Army. As is often true in her work, Molska investigates iconographic images of men who are executing her commands in various territories and situations that offer echos and reworkings of other historic male images.

The piece is accompanied by a complex and versatile sound track, which includes a military march sung by the Soviet Red Army Choir. Thus it conjures the Soviet control of Poland, and other 20th Century wars. Meanwhile, the march, nominally "entertainment," intermingles with a track composed and performed by artist and sound researcher Fatima Miranda, with noises that are difficult to decipher, and what sounds like the voice of a person screaming in pain.
 
F*s (Work)


In this piece, which is generally shown with P=W:t (Power), Molska examines our images of "work" and offers a fresh conceptualization. Laborers arrive at a desolate, muddy field, where they create an airy pyramid made of metal poles. They proceed to layer the pyramid with wooden beams, situate themselves on them at various levels, and call out their names. This self-naming reifies the individual status (or lack thereof) created through their joint labor. The piece could also be read, conversely, as the enactment of a private social revolution that grants social equality to its participants out in no-man's land.

In contrast, the visceral and self-explanatory P=W:t (power) is shot from near ground perspective in an enclosed squash court. Painted white tennis balls (their spring damped down by the paint) are aggressively thrown every which way by an invisible arm, until the entire room fills with them.