Friday, January 16
until Friday, January 23
10am to 5.30pm.
Wednesday: 10am to 8.30pm.
Monday: closed.

Made in 2012 by acclaimed experimental filmmaker Babette Mangolte, this 30-minute film evokes a day in the life of Polish avant-garde artist Edward Krasiński. A space for artistic interventions, the studio became an important venue for Polish contemporary artists and critics of different generations, and it has remained unchanged since Krasiński’s death in 2004.

Courtesy of Babette Mangolte and Broadway 1602, New York

 

Coinciding with the presentation of Villa Toronto, this film will be on show daily during the duration of Villa’s presentation. Entry is free with admission to the AGO.

 

Presented by AGO in association with Villa Toronto

 

Lind Gallery, AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario)
317 Dundas St W, Toronto M5T 1G4
Sunday, January 18
7pm to 8pm

In 1978 the multimedia artist Michael Snow, renowned for his experimental film and music, visited Poland with his band CCMC. In addition to his music, Michael Snow was encouraged by Anna Kutera to bring films to be screened at the Kutera co-founded and co-managed Gallery of Recent Art. One of the pieces shown in 1978 was One Second in Montreal a 16 mm film from 1969 featuring a selection of photographs depicting Montreal in the snow. Snow’s work, both haunting and mysterious, was a point of reference for this selection of 1970s films by the Polish experimental photographers and video-artists based in Wrocław: Janusz Hałas, Lech Mrożek and Romuald Kutera. All three, akin to Snow, contemplated the snowy landscape and the possibilities of experiment offered by camera based media within such a setting. This screening will also include work by Józef Robakowski. In Robakowski’s, I’m Going, the wintery background serves as a backdrop for a master shot that depicts the artist climbing a wooden watchtower. As the film progresses, the growing tiredness of the artist is transposed to the image captured on camera — as the artist’s arm shakes, so too does the camera — consequently merging the materiality of the artist’s body with that of the film itself.


Screening curated by Sylwia Serafinowicz, Collections Curator at the Wrocław Contemporary Museum.

 

Program:

Lech Mrożek, A Collection Two, 1975

Lech Mrożek, Projection, 1976

Lech Mrożek, My Point of View is Not Your Point of View, 1976

Józef Robakowski, I’m Going, 1973

Romuald Kutera, Blot, 1978

Józef Hałas, Painting on the Snow, 1971

 

Presented by Wrocław Contemporary Museum in association with Villa Toronto

 

Camera at Stephen Bulger Gallery
1026 Queen Street West, Toronto, M6J 1H6

 

 

Monday, January 19
7pm to 9pm

Join us for a chat with Toronto-based curator Daniella E. Sanader, whose program “Exercises for Precarious Living” kicks off this year’s Curatorial Incubator at Vtape. Here she proposes a “crisis-mode training session” as a reasonable response to the almost constant state of instability created and sustained by neoliberal capitalism.

 
Presented by Vtape in association with Villa Toronto

 

Vtape
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 452,
Toronto M5V 3A8
Tuesday, January 20
8pm to 9pm

The Doctor never leaves the house. Walking is a major effort for him. He’s big and stout, and his legs are shaky. Even at home, he rarely budges from his armchair. Most of the time he sits at his desk, sipping brandy and gazing out the window at whatever happens in the village. He watches and takes notes. He writes and sketches. His drawings are simple yet precise, perspective renderings of what the Doctor sees from his window. They put order into the chaos of what lies outside: the mud, the animals roaming through the streets, the hanky-panky, the scheming, the money changing hands.

 
The Doctor is a character from Béla Tarr’s film Sátántángo1. I thought of him as I watched the videos that Zbyněk Baladrán has shot using a fixed camera pointed at a tabletop. On it, two hands draw diagrams, write words, cut geometric shapes from sheets of paper, stack books. Sometimes the images are accompanied by a voiceover, like the Narrator in Sátántángo. The voice comments on what the hands are up to, or else ponders universal questions: the number of instants making up a life, the structure of society, the structure of reality. These are obsessive, solipsistic monologues. Reasonings that follow a logical thread, ignoring how this thread leads them, step by step, into a sphere of abstraction that no longer bears any resemblance to the world we know.

 

The Czech artist’s videos serve as mileposts throughout the program. Between them, other images flow: videos by Katinka Bock, Guillaume Leblon, Ulrich Polster, Clemens Von Wedemeyer. I suggest imagining, as one watches, that the nameless, faceless character in Baladrán’s videos has lifted his eyes from the table and is looking out the window, like the Doctor in the film by Béla Tarr. What he sees, what we also see, often seems incomprehensible. A man walks around a room whose floor is covered in mud. Objects come flying out the windows of a country house. In a dimly lit room, in the heart of a deserted, snowbound neighborhood, a TV set shows an Italian movie from the Sixties. Effects whose causes we do not know, causes whose effects we will not see. In choosing the videos, I tried to put myself in the position of someone seeing them for the first time, who knows little or nothing about the artists who made them. In some cases this was not hard at all; I really was seeing the videos for the first time, and I really did know little about the artists. I held onto this ignorance. I did my best to look at these images in and of themselves, like views of the world paraded before us, each bearing its own strangeness, and disappearing as mysteriously as they appear.

 
Since the liquor has run out and his maid seems to have vanished, the Doctor is eventually forced to leave the house. His long wanderings through the muddy streets of the village culminate in a terrible collapse. He is taken to a hospital in the nearest town. When he comes home, some time later, he settles down in front of the usual window, opening his notebook. He patiently waits for someone to come by. Time passes, no one in sight. They must be gathered somewhere in the village, plotting, fornicating, stealing each other blind, the Doctor thinks. They’ll turn up.

What the Doctor doesn’t know is that the inhabitants of the village have all gone away, lured by a swindler’s false promises of work. No one is left, not a soul. But he waits, pen in hand, notebook open. He waits for someone, or something, to appear in the space framed by the window.

And we wait with him.

 
Screening curated by Simone Menegoi


Program:

Zbyněk Baladrán, Night of the World, 1’5”

Guillaume Leblon, Sequenz 01

Zbyněk Baladrán, Moments

Ulrich Polster, Frost

Zbyněk Baladrán, Model of the Contructivist Tower

Katinka Bock, Raus I+II

Polster, Auschlösung

Zbyněk Baladrán, The Long-Ago Death of a Fly

Clemens Von Wedemeyer, Silberhöhe

Zbyněk Baladrán, A model of the Universe

Zbyněk Baladrán, All for no reason I

 
Presented by Galerie Jocelyn Wolff in association with Villa Toronto

 

Camera at Stephen Bulger Gallery
1026 Queen Street West, Toronto, M6J 1H6