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Artist and filmmaker Zuza Banasińska (1994) combines old and new footage to create their own archives. These archives mix reality and imagination and often find expression in films and installations. By compiling their own archives, Banasińska is able to create a level playing field, with worlds where they can explore how images affect our ideologies, systems, and bodies.
The work Banasińska is presenting at Prospects takes inspiration from a boulder. This boulder can be found in the Polish village of Kontrewers and contains petroglyphs: prehistoric rock carvings. These are among the very few petroglyphs to have been found in Poland. Throughout history, this unique object has inspired all kinds of legends and folktales, including the story of a girl who becomes possessed and subsequently kills her own mother.
The video installation Kontrewers (2024) takes this story as its point of departure and recounts it in a non-linear way. Archival material is combined with scenes featuring an old woman who has a connection to the girl. Extreme close-ups of her skin are alternated with shots of animals, the boulder, and its immediate surroundings. The film editing thus results in a conversation between the images, bodies, and histories. In the film, elements from the original story are either accentuated or twisted with the aim of challenging the spectator to think about the normative nature of images, i.e. how images can determine what we think. In this way, the artist is queering the meaning of the images, forging connections between assumptions about ownership and sovereignty in post-Soviet Poland to criticisms on patriarchal systems and exploitation.
Text: Milo Vermeire
Translated from Dutch by Marie Louise Schoondergang (The Art of Translation)