Filmoteka Muzeum

Second part of the diptych based on Tadeusz Miciński’s writings. The first part (Luciferian Lesson, 2006) featured the artist’s attempts at carrying out a dialectical deconstruction of Polish national mythology. Here – in Yoga Lesson – Kozak deals with the universal and everlasting impact of the “Aryan” myth.

The mythologem emerged alongside modernity and burnt down together with modernity in the crematoria. To ashes? Not in the least. The “Aryan” myth survived and is reborn in the collective imagination of late modernity. At the beginning of the 21st century, it stands as an inalienable element of pop cultural scenery. It is the realm of Hollywood cinematography where its presence makes itself the most clearly manifest.

Yoga Lesson extracts “Aryan” topoi from such motion pictures as Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, and collides them with the topoi from Miciński’s writings, drawing up a map of surprising analogies between the discourse of seemingly anachronistic, local literature and the global language of the contemporary cinema. What emerges as a result is a multi-threaded “fresco”, where Tolkien’s figure of White Wizard transforms into a demonic incarnation of Vishnu embodying Hitler described by Miguel Serrano in his novel Adolf Hitler. The Last Avatar …

As for the soundtrack of Lesson, the Hollywood-style symphonic music is counterpointed by post-industrial and folk motifs. David Tibet of the legendary Current 93 performs his famous song Hitler as Kalki, bearing testimony to the fact that our post-industrial era is constantly haunted by the spectres of apocalyptic archetypes.
 

(Description courtesy lokal_30)