Introduction of the artist:

Josef ROBAKOWSKI (Poland)

Born in 1939, Poznań, Poland. Lives and works in ?ód?, Poland.
Selected solo exhibitions: 2009 My Very Own Cinema, Ikon Eastside, Birmingham, UK; 2007 Mirages of Józef R., Muzeum Sztuki, ?ód?, Poland; 2002 The Skies Of Assumed Time, Ma?a Galeria, Warsaw; 2000 From My Window, Frankfurterkunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany; Selected group exhibitions: 2011 Ostalgia, New Museum, New York; 2011 History in Art, MOCAK, Kraków, Poland; 2009 All Creatures Great and Small, Zach?ta, Warsaw; 2009 Sound and Visions, Tel Aviv Contemporary Art Museum; 2007 2nd Moscow Biennale; 2005 Two Asias, Two Europes, Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; 1998 The Bridge (Construction in Process VI), Art Centre, Melbourne; 1998 The Lódz Film School Of Poland: 50 Years, MoMA, New York; 1993 Polnische Avantgarde 1930-1990, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin.

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Introduction of works:

Amongst the first generation of Polish artists to work with video, Józef Robakowski (born 1939) is a pioneer of independent Polish film. A founder member of numerous artists’ organisations, he was a professor at the Film, Television and Theatre State Academy in ?ódz from 1970 to 1981, until removed from his position by the communist authorities and forbidden to either leave the country or show his work in Poland.

From the early 1970s Robakowski interrogated the language, material and mechanics of film, a structural approach corresponding closely to that developing in Britain and across Western Europe and North America during the same period. To this he brought a long-standing interest in Constructivist ideas and conceptualist avant-garde traditions, all filtered through a strong insistence on authenticity and personal identity.

My Very Own Cinema, a highly subjective body of work produced between 1970 and 2000, was described by the artist as “my way of remembering myself.” Its undercurrent is the ideological shift in Eastern Europe from socialism to capitalism and the paranoia of life under military rule in the 1980s. By filming the world around him and narrating everyday events and images in his own, often wryly humorous voice, he deployed a kind of personal resistance to the political situation imposed on him. From My Window, 1978–1999 (2000), for example, was filmed over more than twenty years from Robakowski’s apartment. Looking down onto the public square below, his witty pseudo-documentary observes the daily activities of his neighbours and mass gatherings such as the annual May Day marches.