Kamila Kuc

What We Shared

Kamila Kuc

Manana Bigvava, Leena Makoff

By recreating personal stories though testimony, poetry and archival material, the artist and performers explore deep traumas that no single place or language can contain. Abkhazia, the disputed state on the Black Sea – once an opulent Soviet holiday resort with a multi-ethnic population – became a symbolic ghost town following the 1992-93 war with Georgia. Here, fragmented memories and dreams destroyed by violence and exile are exhumed through interpretive re-enactment and haunting sound.

uchronia, no.1

Kamila Kuc

Fragilities of time and perception are captured in macro in Kamila Kuc's "uchronia, no.1". Seductively textured images contrast against intimate and claustrophobic sounds, forming an eerily demanding observational experience.

I Think You Should Come to America

Kamila Kuc

I Think You Should Come to America explores a paradoxical fascination of the Poles behind the Iron Curtain with the ideal of America as a "land of freedom" and investigates the cultural conditions in which memories are created. The film uses numerous American educational films to expose the patters of cultural (mis)representation.

noonwraith blues

Kamila Kuc

Kamila Kuc

Ominous cinegrams of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia print, intercut, like cascading scythes, with depictions of a woman in a field, evoking repetitions that exist in harvest rituals, as well as in gestures of madness. Specters of familial anxieties creep into this loose take on the myth of Poludnica (“Noonwraith” or “Lady Midday”), a Slavic harvest spirit that could cause madness in those who wandered the fields alone.

In the Same Room

Kamila Kuc

In the Same Room (2014) is an exercise in creating a mood of uncertainty and suspense rather than telling a coherent story. A disconcerting atmosphere is achieved here largely through sound, designed by Timothy Nelson, and mixed with manipulation of pre-existing film sounds. The film’s title came from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’ (1936). A friend of mine opened the essay at a random page, closed her eyes, and pointed to the following sentence: ‘The resident master craftsman and the travelling journeyman worked together in the same rooms […]’