Medical Gymnastics, 2008
HD video; length 8' 3"
Medical Gymnastics (2008) uses photographs taken from an old gymnastics manual, stretching and animating them to reveal striking exercises and remind the viewer of body classifications that are still taken for granted today. Shown as part of Survival Kit a decade after its production, the film is one of the first of Polska’s video works in which gymnastics as an aesthetic and artistic venture is used to tie together politics and sports. The recent World Cup continues to relate national pride with athletic superiority. The women in the film bring up notions of gender and gender-testing, which are still used to classify people biologically into categories that affect their legal and social status. The division between women and men at the Olympics and in national sports teams is still largely uncontested.
Polska is a video artist who uses editing techniques to create surreal and melancholy commentaries on contemporary interpretations of the past and present. Beginning with found archival material, Polska’s videos often reveal how history is represented and re-interpreted through time. Polska’s more recent work turns to the ways in which the archive, artworks, and scientific events all require some form of interpretation in order to be ‘completed’—whether, as in the case of an exhibition, the interpretation of an immediate audience, or that of an imagined viewer. The way this work demonstrates the flexibility of seemingly objective content questions notions of established truths as well as the authorship of artists in situations of changing political structures and audiences. Interested in art history, Polska sometimes uses the mechanisms of myth to reveal forgotten or little-known art historical episodes and inventions. In Eastern Europe, and in Poland in particular, the artistic contributions of entire generations have been veiled by a Western art historical narrative that has a blind spot where this region is concerned. As art history currently seeks out its own alternative narratives, Polska’s practice of revisiting these episodes reveals how the concept of a metaphorical ‘outland’ shifts over time against the backdrop of political and societal changes.