Collection

Ten Works is a set of ten films by Wojciech Bruszewski from 1973-1977, comprising of four films and six video works. The artist initiated and analyzed complex relations of video/film representation, represented reality and the human perceptive-cognitive system. Bruszewski asserted the idea of reality dualism. He distinguished between its material (physical reality) and mental aspect (mental representations of reality). According to Bruszewski, a person growing up in Western culture is told to subordinate to the matter of reality he/she perceives according to specific, already defined cognitive models/patterns that he/she recognizes as reality itself.

Besides that, Bruszewski pays attention to the role that mechanical tools of recording and transmitting reality images (film, video) play in creation of new conventions of perception. The artist was aware that the new media are admittedly free from fantasies and projections which a human being projects onto reality, however these media do not create a truly real image of reality. The new media function as another interpretation, one more convention. In the course of filming and montage manipulating the new media create yet another frame of reality.

In the video works from the series Ten Works, the world is seen as a kind of material reservoir of audio-visual sensations we receive and filter (through our experience, culture and language, etc.), thus giving them meaning, which is often an unconscious process. In the artist's mind manipulation in the structure of sound and image is supposed to help us realize that the body (sensual perception) and the mind/intelligence (interpretation of perceptual data) constitute a whole. These realizations are there to reveal that the perception mechanism is based on conceptual and linguistic models, which determine specific modes of observation and interpretation of reality. Here, Bruszewski used strategies he himself named “setting traps for what exists.”