Filmoteka Muzeum

The group Pracownia Dziekanka, also known as Bałdyga-Onuch-Szajna, was established in Warsaw in 1976 and characterised from the very beginning by a complex institutional status. The artists who formed the group, Janusz Bałdyga, Jerzy Onuch and Łukasz Szajna (students at the time), operated as an academic club of the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, which followed its own autodidactic path at odds with the then curriculum of the Academy. Apart from that, they ran a neo-avantgarde art gallery called 'Pracownia' at the Students' Centre for Artistic Circles 'Dziekanka'. The activity of 'Pracownia' (as an art institution) formed an integral part of the artists’ plan to devise and propose a new, more contemporary form of teaching and communing with art at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts. The artists intended to bring the Academy and the Centre closer to one another. Their idea resulted in the concept of the assembly film called Film Statement.

The work originates from the early days of Bałdyga, Onuch and Szajna's collaboration with 'Dziekanka', which began when the artists responded to a proposal by its then manager, Wojciech Krukowski. He suggested that the students of the Academy make use of the film camera (16 mm) owned by the institution. Krukowski’s intention was to attract particularly interesting artistic personalities from the Warsaw Academy to 'Dziekanka' and provide them with the possibility to confront more contemporary artistic media (than e.g. painting or sculpture). It was well reflected in the formula of the assembly work Film Statement, produced by Bałdyga-Onuch-Szajna and inspired by Krukowski in 1977.

The artists set the length of three minutes for a single piece. Their idea was to grant access to the field of 'photographic media' to artists who had never experimented there before. The legacy of the project is a number of interesting intermedial experiments such as Zygmunt Piotrowski's film, which extended the artist’s experience in the field of poster art. Yet, there is more to Film Statement than a mere experiment. It is above all a portrait of a certain artistic milieu – somewhat of a living gallery of the approaches and strategies of artists affiliated with 'Dziekanka'.
 

(ŁR)