Filmoteka Muzeum

Some of Jastrubczak’s video works provide a record of the artist’s simplest activities that consists in staging almost imperceptible actions. These projects introduce certain slight shifts in reality. Thus, they question the status of reality by combining random actions of uninvolved individuals with elements of performance art – authentic and staged situations merge into one.

In the films The Death of Magellan and In Search of the Miraculous, we can see the back of a figure against the background of the river Vistula. The surrounding reality becomes a film frame where slight shifts occur.

The Death of Magellan is an early work where the artist plays on perspective by creating a straight line in a short-lived arrangement of two bodies (the person on the bank and the person on the boat). The lookalike on the boat becomes a diminished version of the person on the bank of the river (as if seen in linear perspective). The moment when the two bodies form a straight line lasts merely a second.

A similar approach can be found in In Search of the Miraculous, where the action is set at the foot of the Wawel Hill. The work relies on the same kind of shift that questions the status of events and persons portrayed in the film. The ephemeral character of the entire situation and the context of the place perplex the viewer as to which of the elements form part of natural scenery, and which result from the artist’s intervention. Jastrubczak – here as a mysterious figure – appears akin to a spectre that can be captured only for a brief while and then disappears. Yet, that single moment puts the entire reality in a confusing situation.

(SzM)