"Eastern-Europe Histories" Participants

ABSTRACT
Paris – Berlin – Warsaw. Experiment, Autonomy and Subversion.“ is a research project dedicated to the (ongoing) history of the experiment in film and art, as well as in live and the reality itself, and to the interactions between those fields in these three countries in this very special time. This project involves analysing the filmmakers’ reaction to the very politically-focused reality of the time, demonstrating the various manipulations, transformations and distortions (anamorphoses) of reality in film, and describing parallel realities between these countries. The analysis will address various forms and interpretations, concentrating on the interactions between concrete reality and the film (political context), the relationship between music and moving images (music scenes, particularly the very little known New Wave and Post-Punk movement in the GDR and Poland), the Dadaistic references (the absurd as cinematic aesthetics and strategy), the sensual reality of the cinematic substance (aestheticisation of image scratches, perforation, projector staging), and the local references in an international network of permanent co-operation which existed all the time (for example within the framework of Fluxus, la COOP!, or the Workshop for Film Form). While the conventional art-history narrative assumes that the first and the real film avant-garde movement came from the West, worlds of experimental art and film were often invented or created similarly in the East. Attempting to reconstruct Eastern “hidden” avant-gardes, as well as the mutual perspective shift, influences and inspirations between the three countries will be an important part of the research and analysis. Thanks to the artists who contributed to this project (Józef Robakowski, Ewa Partum, Alain Fleischer, Zbig Rybczynski, …) we have the possibility to examine, interpret and compare very rare, sometimes even lost or forgotten filmic material that we came across during our visits in the artists’ studios and in the private archives.

BIO
Aneta Panek was born in Warsaw. She studied art history at the University Paris 4 Sorbonne, where she particularly worked on the questions of transmediality in arts and on artistic exchanges between the three countries; France, Germany and Poland – in the framework of her master memoir entitled “On the use of photography in the work of Alain Fleischer” and her DEA dissertation about “Geometric abstraction in France, in Germany and in Poland in the fifties”, both with Prof. Serge Lemoine as supervisor. From 2007 until 2012 she was responsible for the artistic program of the Polish Institute in Berlin. Since 2005 she works for the German television as author of films and reportages. Her documentary “My Heaven is Full of Music” was enclosed 2011 in the collection of the Museum Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. At present Aneta Panek lives and works in Berlin, as art historian, curator and film maker. She works as a member of a research project “To each his own reality. The notion of real in art in France, West Germany and East Germany and Poland from the 1960s to the end of the 1980s.” led by Dr. Mathilde Arnoux. At the same time she prepares a dissertation entitled “Paris – Berlin – Warsaw. Experimental Art, Film and Music in the 80’. Experimentation, Autonomy and Subversion. » with Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski as supervisor, at the Universität der Künste Berlin, Institut für zeitbasierte Medien und Variantologie.