Innocent Bodies

The National Gallery’s video installation series continues with an exhibition of two recent films by the internationally acclaimed Polish artist Agnieszka Polska (b. 1985). The exhibition Innocent Bodies considers the vulnerability of contemporary existence at a time of radically shifting interrelationships between humans, technological systems, and the natural world. Polska is particularly attuned to the social science of affective economy: how unnatural forces and states of being reshape our bodily emotions, physiology, and consciousness.

Longing Gaze (2021-22) addresses the paradoxical conditions of human intimacy and the violation of privacy through surveillance technology. Made in the aftermath of the global pandemic of 2020-21, it considers the imposed state of isolation, restricted movement, and loss of physical contact that occurred during lockdown, as well as the concomitant rise in networked social interactions.

The Book of Flowers (2023) is a sci-fi work made from found footage of a 16mm time-lapse film about flowering plant morphology shot in the 1940s and 50s and manipulated with AI-powered animation. The result posits an alternate natural history of human-plant evolutionary symbiosis, offering a new reality generated by human imagination and machine learning.

Polska works at the intersection of ancient storytelling traditions and the currency of human experience, employing advanced image-making technologies, including filmmaking, video, photography, and animation. She frequently starts with found images, distorting and manipulating them, often with the use of AI technology. Ambient sound, music, and narration interlace with her poetic cinematic stories.

About the artist

Agnieszka Polska was born in Lublin, Poland, in 1985. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, including exhibitions at MoMA and the New Museum in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London, and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. She has had solo exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, M HKA in Antwerp, Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Nottingham Contemporary, and Salzburger Kunstverein. She participated in the 57th Venice Biennale, 11th Gwangju Biennale, 19th and 24th Biennale of Sydney, 14th Shanghai Biennale, and 13th Istanbul Biennial. In 2017, she was awarded the Preis der Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Presently, she lives and works in Berlin.