Impakt Works: Ania Molska  Ania Molska was born in Poland on March 6, 1983. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poland’s capital Warsaw. During her study, Molska mainly focused on new media studies (video, audio-visual), a subject which is taught under the supervision of the studio of Grzegorz Kowalski, an artist who has also educated a number of other well-known Polish artists (including Artur Zmijewski and Katarzyna Kozyra).Kowalski has very outspoken ideas on art and its social objects. And these ideas are clearly reflected in Molska’s work. Grzegorz Kowalski calls his way of teaching ‘Partnership Teaching’, a principle of teaching which shares characteristics with the free teaching method as advocated by German artist Joseph Beuys in the 1960s. Social awareness, involvement and participation in the outside world are regarded as features of art that are just as important as the expression of art itself. Kowalski hands his pupils the important task of choosing between practicing art within the safe and secluded environment of the arts world and practicing art with strong involvement in the outside world. It seems as if Ania Molska does not want to make a definite choice. Her video works often show a combination of both elements as if she is looking to find the middle path in the diverging functions of art. On the one hand, her involvement with the outside world is clearly visible in her work, for instance, in her images of working people reflecting Molska’s interest in the image of people who complete a specific task by means of working together. On the other hand, Molska experiments with the avant-garde language of images by putting images in an alienating context, placing them upside down, or strongly zooming in on them. The result is a two dimensional, abstract composition on film. With both artistic directions, Molska eventually refers to the same subject matter, to wit, Russian communism. The hard working laborers often featured in Molska’s videos are a symbol of the communist ideal, while the suprematistic planes of Molska’s alienating images are a direct reference to Russian avant-garde. By juxtaposing these references, Molska exposes and explores traces of the communist past in today’s Poland. She shows her grief about the prematurely terminated project of the Russian avant-garde and instigates a search for the black square of our time. During her residency at Impakt, Molska will organize a workshop in collaboration with her fellow artist Krzysztof Franaszek. For this workshop, Molska will invite students from the Utrecht School of the Arts to gather on a large field near the center of Utrecht. What will take place there is left to the free creative minds of the students. The project’s objective is that young artists will engage in making their own works of art, installations or performances during a period of one week (from 2 February through to 10 February). Molska and Franaszek will document the activities carried out during the workshop. Eventually, Molska will use the documented materials to produce an entirely, new video work. With this concept, Molska appears to follow the line of her earlier work. Her preference for documenting labor and people working together is also clearly visible in this project. However, this time, laborers are replaced by art students as the subject of the video work. This work will be experimental in nature due to the limited time available for editing of the documented material. Indeed, the freshly produced video will be shown very shortly after completion of the workshop. On 24 February, Molska’s film will be premiered at Film Theater ’t Hoogt. Date: Tuesday 24th of February, 19:00hours Location: Cinema, 't Hoogt, Hoogt 4, Utrecht Entrance: 8,- Euro (CJP/U-pas, 65+, student: 7 Euro) Reservations: 't Hoogt 030-2328388 /info@hoogt.nl 
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