OSAD (SEDIMENT)

 

15'15"

HD

2014

 

"Doroszuk, exploring those spaces of a gallery which are out of reach of spectators, exposes trails and afterimages of desires, fantasies, resentments, nostalgia and celebration of the past. A personal investigation is carried on in peculiar vanitas scenery.

 

I've been intrigued by the space that is located at the bottom of architectonic hierarchy [of an art institution]; it's invisible yet extremely influent. All digested and excreted remains of stories, events, art works are falling down here, like to a lake bed. It is perfect archaeological site, a chronicle of institutional supression." *

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* Sylwia Czubała. Towards a Critical Institution, Galeria Miejska Arsenał, Poznań, 2014.

 

realization, photography, editing:

Wojtek Doroszuk

 

sound design:

Igor Kłaczyński

 

coordination of the project:

Sylwia Czubała

 

 

PRINCE

 

19'50"

HD

2014

 

A man performs the same ritual every day: he cleans his shoes, dresses up in his shiny blue suit, wears his white gloves and grey hat, and spends his time walking around Brazzaville. His presence generates an absurd apparition in the urban chaos of the city, which reflects the imaginary produced by one of the upmost icons of pop culture.

 

Interview by Steven Cairns for Vdrome

____

realization, photography, editing:

Wojtek Doroszuk

 

1st assistant director, photography:

Matthieu Maunier-Rossi

 

2st assistant director:

Cléo Konongo

 

with Elohim "Prince" Ntsiete

and the musicians: Kitcho Batola, Morgane Bangissa, Malone Jude Bayimissa, Freda Ganga, Kermess, Nicolas Moumbounou

 

production : Rictus | David Bobee

with support from Les Indépendances, Paris

 

special thanks to Sylvain Cochard, Philippe Chamaux, Ella Ganga, Samuel Kidiba, Davy Malonga

 

realized in Brazzaville, Congo

 

 

SAPE

 

16'10"

HD

2014

 

"La Sape stands for the Société des ambianceurs et des personnes élégantes, or the Society of Ambiance-Makers and Elegant People. Its members include Congo’s celebrities who compete against one another in impeccable manners and extravagant looks. Futurist dandies who frequently live in houses with no running water. The necessary equipment of les sapeurs includes a cigar, always wrapped in cellophane. Knee highs. Leather, preferably Weston shoes. A bow tie. A necktie or a cravat. A hat. Choreographed movements meant to expose the stamp of the maker on shoe soles and labels of fashion houses on the lining of their jackets.

(…) Members of the society are considered to be celebrities in Brazzaville; they are invited to important celebrations as their presence boosts the prestige of any event. Their video portfolios are endlessly screened in local bars and shops so one can take an informed decision about the person one wants to invite and his style. One of such events is featured in Doroszuk’s film. We see the funeral of a well-known Brazzaville sapeur and the owner of the La Main Bleue [The Blue Hand] club." *

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* Łukasz Wojtysko. “Kings of Life and Prince.” Wojtek Doroszuk. Bliż / Wojtek Doroszuk. The Near Point, Galeria Arsenał, Białystok, 2016, pp. 35–37.

 

realization, photography, editing:

Wojtek Doroszuk

 

1st assistant director, photography:

Matthieu Maunier-Rossi

 

2st assistant director:

Cléo Konongo

 

with Hassan Salvador and sapeurs of Brazzaville

 

production : Rictus | David Bobee

with support from Les Indépendances, Paris

 

special thanks to Sylvain Cochard, Philippe Chamaux, Ella Ganga, Samuel Kidiba, Davy Malonga

 

realized in Brazzaville, Congo

 

 

FESTIN

 

20'15"

HD

2013

 

"Festin" takes as its inspiration the paintings of the 17th century Flemish animalist artists, such as Frans Snyder, Jan and Ferdinand Van Kessel combined with post humanistic experimentation to envisage a future world in which the human has disappeared.

 

The film portrays a vanitas tableau of decay and disorder where the guests have been usurped by uninvited intruders. The imagery within the film brings to mind a sort of post apocalyptic epilogue of humankind, a portent of a future referring to various present day representations of ghost towns and abandoned settlements from around the world.

____

directed and edited by:

Wojtek Doroszuk

 

executive producer:

Agata Szymańska | Filmpolis

 

production assistant:

Paweł Przywara

 

director of photography:

Michał Sosna

 

second camera:

Marcin Łaskawiec

 

assistant camera:

Mariusz Orzechowski

 

sound mixer + designer:

Igor Kłaczyński

 

lighting:

Bartłomiej Gocał

Zbigniew Radkiewicz

Kamil Smoter

(Cinelight Film)

 

set designer, food stylist:

Małgorzata Molska

Marta Wyczółkowska

 

florist:

Marta Kostrz

 

entomologist:

Zbigniew Zalewski

 

animal welfare:

Izabela Wałek

Zula Przybylińska

and volunteers of the Krakow Animal Shelter

 

title design:

Yomar Augusto | yomaraugusto.com

 

artistic collaboration:

David Bobee

 

The antiques from private collection of the Sosenko family were used in the film.

 

The film was realized with the support of:

Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles Haute-Normandie

The City of Rouen

Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris

 

 

The First Day of Summer

 

29'30"

HD

2010

 

A terrain of local mills, ruins of a mental hospital and a meadow on Wda river bank are the background of "video-thriller" realized in the town of Świecie, Poland with participation of its inhabitants.

 

Three groups of volunteers act out three situations inspired with local urban legends.

____

directed and edited by:

Wojtek Doroszuk

 

photography:

Małgorzata Mazur

 

title design:

Yomar Augusto | yomaraugusto.com

 

cooperation:

Łukasz Jastrubczak

 

performed by:

Joanna Siedlar, Wiktoria Majka, Krzysztof Lipiński, Paweł Kołakowski, Roman Bączkowski, Michał Kulpa, Jacek Śledź, Marcin Skorcz, Tomasz Rozumczyk, Danuta Kanabaj, Karina Dzieweczyńska, Stefania Dziewe-czyńska, Klaudiusz Dzieweczyński, Justyna Sień, Dawid Sień, Urszula Sień, Magdalena Sień, Anna Hałabuda, Krzysztof Kunc, Natalia Wydrzyńska, Paulina Wydrzyńska, Anna Wydrzyńska, Cecylia Schmidt, Edmund Kminikowski, Karol Bogucki

 

The film has been realized within the framework of "The Awakening 20.10" project [The Town of Świecie - New Gaze].

curator: Karina Dzieweczyńska

organizer: OKSiR in Świecie

The project has been co-funded by The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland.

 

 

CALL ME POETIC

 

14'20"

HD

2010

 

A NYC subway car, direction: Queens. There is a guy sitting in front of me, he is reciting his poetry, quietly at the beginning, looking up crumpled, closely written leafs of his notebook. After a while he is speeding up, it’s getting louder, stronger, turning into expressive performance, hypnotic flow of grief, sex, faith and mutiny; “Call me poetic, ’Cause I got the power”. Magnetic power of sins and confession. It’s my station, I need to get off. We will meet one more time soon.

 

____

With Sedgrick Jacob III. The recording has been realized with support of: Location One (New York), Trust of Mutual Understanding (New York), Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle / A-I-R Laboratory (Warsaw), Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland, Polish Cultural Institute in New York.

 

 

SPECIAL FEATURES

 

32'00

SD video

2009

 

"Special features are supplements accompanying home editions of popular movies; the option is accessible from the level of menu and it usually offers footages that document the origin of the main DVD content, side effects of working on a movie set, or other materials that were considered trivial, insignificant or even dangerous and damaging to the final form of the masterpiece.

 

The innocent-sounding bonus features offer the power of the voyeur to intrigued spectators. Dissatisfied with the proper DVD's content, from now on they can spy on the secrets of a movie set (just click behind the scenes), actors who burst out laughing (choose bloopers), they can freely look through all the cut out, censored or unused scenes (outtakes).

 

I indulge in a certain ignorance in "Special Features": I turn my back on the proper realization and focus on the supplements that circle around it. I ransack the garbage of a movie workshop and I do justice to all the scraps, rejects, notes, and drafts. I try to forget about the work, about its importance, and I focus on images that had no chance of being a part of it." *

 

____

* Special Features, Centres for Contemporary Art BWA, Awangarda Gallery, Wrocław, 2009.

 

 

Raspberry Days

 

18'30

HD

2008

 

Raspberry farm in Innvik, Norway, situated right on a slope of a fiord is a working place of some Poles who come here every summer. The farm faces the sea that cuts into the land on one side and is sheltered with a dense forest on the other.

 

Pickers, in silence and concentration, fill their baskets with berries. A rustle of leaves and the melodies they sing merge with the voices of birds and the swoosh of the wind. Workers, as insects concentrated on their work, become the organic element of the order of nature. They only seem a kind of staffage in this nature’s gentle rhythm.

 

I had heard a lot about the fabulous scenery in which Polish raspberry pickers worked in the Norwegian village of Innvik, about living in a cabin with floor heating and swimming every morning in the fjord’s cool waters (...).

 

One summer I decided to take a closer look at life at the famed farm, spending the long Scandinavian summer days working and relaxing with the others. I used almost every spare moment to discreetly peep at this idyll, in which man seemed a visible, but rather insignificant, element of an omnipresent orgy of nature. And so, slowly, a kind of nature documentary was created, in which both the pickers and the insects perform their busy rituals in full concentration.

 

Separated from each other by the long rows of raspberry bushes, the pickers seldom have an opportunity to talk to each other so they spend whole days in silence. A constant mantra. The monotonous rhythm of the gestures. The prolonged company of your own thoughts, to which you voluntarily sentence yourself, induces a mental state that the newcomers didn’t know before. Those from the city initially try to resist it, but gradually surrender to it completely. Silence becomes pure pleasure. We are led through the film virtually only by the sounds of nature: the swoosh of the wind, the raindrops, the rustling of the leaves, the chirping of the birds. *

 

____

* from "Special Features" (2009)

 

 

Tumor IMAGINIS

 

29'30

HD

2008

 

"Tumor Imaginis" (L. 'a tumour of image') is devoted to discreet relations between art and medicine. The main character, a pathologist and our guide to the hospital morgue, developed particular attitude towards surrounding world filled with images of death and human diseases during his 30-years practice. Attentive observation of pathological phenomena and symptoms, innumerable visual investigations, made him perceive himself as an artist rather that a medic, since, according to dr Frasik, art, death and diseases strongly consist in pure visual experience.

 

Here, diseases and death gain their aesthetic aspect: under the microscope the most dangerous types of cancer happen to be the most beautiful ones; laboratories and mortuary rooms resemble gallery rather than aseptic, hospital space – the doctor has decorated them with a collection of paintings and drawings.

 

____

directed and edited by:

Wojtek Doroszuk

 

photography:

Rymwid Błaszczyk

Wojtek Doroszuk

 

scientific advisory:

dr Krzysztof Okoń

Marek Lekki

 

production:

CSW "Znaki Czasu" in Toruń

 

Special thanks to dr Wiesław Frasik for cooperation on this project.

 

 

Gençlik Park

 

12'00

SD

2008

 

Gençlik Park (Turk. 'youth park') is the largest and the oldest park of the Turkish capital Ankara, where in the past its residents used to spend leisure time. Several dozen of hectares of land in the center of the city was once occupied by a huge artificial lake, beautiful funfair and botanical garden, numerous cafeterias and restaurants, etc.

 

Processing from several years water crisis and drought as well as dynamic economic transformation, however, have gradually led Gençlik Park to fall into ruin and caused substantial loss of its popularity: the cafeterias have been closed down, parks and gardens have dried out and the magnificent lake has turn into the concrete dessert.

 

By day the oneiric Youth Park strives to maintain appearances of lives: drowsy ushers frozen in awaiting the visitors; those ones lured with loud music are being welcomed by the empty tea shops and shabby carousels.

 

 

BIRKAç YER (SOME PLACES)

 

22'30

SD

2007

 

"I met Toprak in Ankara. One night he came to a studio together with my friend Özlem and some other guys. They are extremely brave: they are transes, fags, Kurds, leftists – all people that Turkey hates. They are heroes – this is how founders of Turkish LGBT movement were introduced to me. I've heard legends of them in Istanbul. Some of them have to stay at hiding after two-year term in famous Ulucanlar prison so as not to do next two years – officially for evading military service. They can lock you up endlessly like that. Toprak also did his time in Ulucanlar. Although he had not gone under surgery yet, they decided he is not a man and he is no longer a woman, so they kept him all the time in separate cell.

 

He calls himself Papa Gender. I asked him to show me Ankara, if he would like to be my guide. I would pay for hanging around a couple of hours by taxi and he would show me the most important places in his transgender life, drawing a map of traumas and moments of his happiness. It was a day of his 31st birthday." *

 

"Talking in Turkish to his girlfriend in company with understanding nothing Polish, [Toprak] resembles characters of earlier Doroszuk's film, „Lunch [1]”, where group of some people is talking in different languages keeping up appearances of mutual communication, seating together at the table. Doroszuk is recording vibrating city from the window of running taxi. He will find out whole story later, after translating a soundtrack. The inside of the car resembles a bathyscaphe in which accidental and strange people survived horrible catastrophe (...)." **

 

____

* Wojtek Doroszuk, Birkaç Yer / Kilka Miejsc, the exhibition brochure, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Okna Gallery, Warsaw 2007

 

** Marcin Krasny, Birkaç Yer / Kilka Miejsc, the exhibition brochure, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Okna Gallery, Warsaw 2007

 

Special thanks to: Toprak Izci, Aslı, Caner Ozgokmen, Ozlem Sariyildiz and Ezgi Saritas

 

 

REISEFIEBER

 

SD

2007

a series of 5 films:

"Lot", 13'37", music by Michał Gorczyca

"2006/07", dual-channel, loop

"Sümela Restaurant", 6'25", photography: Tanja Cummings

"Cosy-Wasch", 5'40", photography: Dima Limpert

"Volkshochschule City West (Berlin)", 11'05"

 

"Doroszuk presents 5 films [in the exhibition Reisefieber *] released during his stay in Berlin which appears as a huge pot in which multicultural mixture is gurgling, the city-stage where strangers act out their individual performances every day. An artist creates expressive characters of potential emigrant from Central Europe, trifling with his own identity (...).

 

All films in the cycle keep us in suspense; they hit with overwhel-ming silence and atmosphere of undefined alienation and elusive nostalgia - being not in the right place and not at the right time. Lost character tries to merge into his background, attempts to disappear and melt away in magma of strangeness; his mind seems to be continuously somewhere else, sank in the myth of the homeland, a non existing paradise. Although strangeness is subject to gradation, "mentally" alienated characters of Entekhabi's and Doroszuk's films are situated very close one another." **

 

"(...) The films from Berlin penetrate also existential questions: the identity in a globalized world and it's specific sorts, being seemingly the same but yet different, the alienation from the celebrating crowd, being an Eastern European or, finally, a Pole with the burden of history in a place that is it's symbol. After all, the action takes place in Berlin, evoking such themes as the history of the troublesome relations between Poland and Germany, the problem of the capital of the united Germany, a large city with the ambition to be the new European capital, however, not free from cracks or wounds from historical cataclysms. Berlin as the arena of East European alienation." ***

 

____

* * Reisefieber - [Ger. the state of excitement and anxiety connected with a prospect of a journey, lit. "travel fever"] the title of the series of 5 films and Doroszuk's solo show within the framework of the "Transkultura" project; Gallery of Contemporary Art Bunkier Sztuki, Kraków 2007

 

** Marta Lisok, "In the never-ending between", ArtPapier, 5 (77) 2007

 

*** Magdalena Ujma, "External and Internal Journeys", Reisefieber, the exhibition catalogue, Gallery of Contemporary Art Bunkier Sztuki, Kraków 2007

 

Special thanks to: Tanja Cummings, Dima Limpert, Jule Isolde Jürgens, Kasha Bittner, Brigitte Lenel, Hannah Maischein

 

 

DISSECTION THEATRE

 

10'20"

HD

2006

 

"Searching for the genuine and revealing the inauthentic is a characteristic motif in Wojtek Doroszuk's work (...). The Dissection Theatre, a film showing preparations of a corpse to the funeral, touches the genuine and transgresses the artificial. The extreme experience of breaking a taboo through the lens of a seemingly ‘objective’ camera, shown in an aesthetically perfect form, makes the artist and viewer immune to shock. The effect is reinforced by references to the rational Renaissance art of Andrea Mantegna, Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo." *

 

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* Ewa Magorzata Tatar, Dominik Kurylek, "Viewer traps" the catalogue of 8th Eugeniusz Geppert Competition and 7th Exhibition of Young Painting, Centres for Contemporary Art BWA, Wroclaw 2007