Kunstraum Potsdamer Strasse
2023, Berlin
The exhibition explores the theme of dreams and their many meanings. The works presented in the exhibition illustrate how different the approaches to this topic can be and highlight different themes. Because in our dreams we first and foremost process our own reality. Sometimes we are trapped in a nightmare, sometimes we dream of a parallel world to escape from everyday life. Thus dreams always have the potential of bringing forth something new. In visions of the future, a dream can, for example, bring groups together to develop alternatives to the present reality. A utopia can thus release forces to cope with the present, to imagine a "just" future and to fight for it. Whether these visions are perceived as utopian or dystopian depends on the social position of the individual. For utopian and dystopian living conditions do not arise in a vacuum, but are always conditioned by prevailing power structures, such as the capitalist world order, patriarchy and white supremacy.
Text by Laura Arda about the installation from Maja Zagórska:
Maja Zagórska and Jemima Foxtrot "She held up a mirror" (2022)
Installation with video (6:51 min) and sculpture Playground
The protagonist, a Black woman, wakes up and slowly starts her day. She washes her face, brushes her teeth and carefully puts on lotion. The viewer accompanies her from her morning ritual into her daily life and from her apartment to the public space of the streets. Her large yellow eyes look back at her from the mirror in the morning, marking her as a not exclusively human being. In the course of the video, the hybrid being repeatedly appears, expanding the idea of what a woman and a human can be.
Maja Zagórska and Jemima Foxtrot stage several glitches, disruptions of binary identity. "Glitch Feminism" is explored by Legacy Russell in her 2020 eponymous book and continues ideas of cyberfeminism. According to Glitch Feminism, within those system failures lie the chances to refuse binary attribution and undermine any limitations imposed by categories such as ethnicity, gender, or sexuality.
If the viewers turn away from the video and look into the fleshed-out portal, they are also reflected in it and see the video in the background. "Let’s play" is engraved into the upper part of the mirror, which can be understood as an invitation to question one’s own categories of identity and to mutate.
Seeing the protagonist and her leaps in between these identity-forming categories in the background therefore also changes the view of our own reflection.
Which external characteristics determine our assignment to certain categories?
What consequences do these assignments have? And what potential does a disruption of the clearly ascribable exterior offer?
The video is accompanied by the poem A Little God (2022), which Jemima Foxtrot wrote particularly for the video. The poem is understood as a partner piece to Sylvia Plath's "Mirror" (1961). By recycling much of the language from the original poem, A Little God updates and responds to the original from the perspective of the shape-shifting protagonist.
This also creates a dialogue between the second wave feminism which may have inspired Sylvia Plath, and the ideas of fourth wave feminism, which Legacy Russell represents with Glitch Feminism
The work She held up a mirror was originally created solely as a video. For the exhibition "verträumt" the original two-channel video work expands into an installation with the sculpture Playground.
Two channel video installation next to Hamza Badran at Foyer42, Basel
2023
Foyer42 is a video exhibition format located in a window front in one of Basel’s busiest streets. In the monthly changing exhibitions, two single-channel video positions are being confronted with each other, giving their respective counterpart a new and fruitful context.
Foyer 42 is curated by the video enthusiasts Leah Studinger & Raphael Reichert.
With friendly support by Christoph Merian Stiftung, Abteilung Kultur Basel-Stadt and our hosts of Feldberg42.
Feldbergstrasse 42 | 4057 Basel
theoretical workshops / group exhibition
2023
Dissolving the boundaries of time has always been a queer strategy to survive under heterosexual hegemony. Questioning 'time', the queer subject challenges power relations and linear narratives, but finds itself excluded from this process of giving meaning to the frame of life.
Drawing on the theory of queer temporalities, 13 emerging artists rethink time-paradigms in a cross-temporal journey. The exhibition builds a temporal assemblage, a mosaic of counter-experiences and traces where ephemeral relics from the queer archive merge with evanescent memories of pasts imagined, real, or reconstructed. “Queer Things Take Time” engenders a temporal playground that transforms this now into a site of time-making, exploration, dissidence and transformation.
Challenging the notions of 'linearity of time', 'History' and 'future', the exhibition merges together different artistic practices into a complex body of work. Through a multimedia experience visitors are invited to reflect on heteronormative temporality and question their own understanding of time by intersecting 'past', 'present' and 'future' to bring forth their own queer temporalities.
About the installation from Maja Zagórska:
In the course of the video, several glitches are being staged, where the protagonist, a black woman, slips between different corporal stages, expanding the idea of what a woman and a human can be. This glitches work as system failures, disruptions, where the chances to refuse binary attributions and undermine any limitations imposed by categories such as ethnicity, gender, or sexuality lie.
If the viewers turn away from the video and look into the fleshed-out mirror portal, the engraved “let’s play!” Invites them to question their own categories of identity and to glitch in their imagination.
FRIES TV – Offener Text- und Videokunstkanal am Ebertplatz
/ Forever Yours 2.0
55m long LED video installation
February 2022
commisioned by @friestv_ebertplatz Forever Yours 2.0 is a site specific LED video installation version of ‘Forever Yours’ , experimental animation that explores themes of commodification, consumer cycles, advertising culture and cuteness.
The animation is a final product of artistic research on creative pet grooming competitions.
Available to see 04.02 - 17.02.2022
as a part of „FRIES TV – Offener Text- und Videokunstkanal am Ebertplatz“ supported by Kulturamt der Stadt Köln.
https://unser-ebertplatz.koeln/friestv/
VIDEO 9’23”
3D animation and 8mm footage
2022
She Held up a Mirror is a dialog between 2nd and 4th wave feminism. It explores society’s perception of women and their relationship with gender expectations and body standards. The film uses found footage, 3D animation, super8, poetry and prosthetics to ask questions about gender performativity, monstrous women, the cult of youth and freedom.
The first part of the video is an exploration of Sylvia Plath’s poem Mirror. Set in a cold, digital bedroom, it is narrated by the “objective” mirror, portrayed here additionally by a smartphone and a laptop screen.
The “mirror” is looking at a woman loosing her beauty and youth—two important social currencies for women living in a male-dominated society. Simultaneously “the mirrors” are showing assemblage of found footage material, consisting of different feminist icons, demonstrations, non-binary activists, pop culture references and many different representations of female read bodies, therefore broadening the understanding of the protagonist from the poem.
In the second part of the video (original poem by Jemima Foxtrot), the woman speaks back . She explores and rejects society’s perception of her body and the expectations put on her by capitalistic beauty standards and gender norms. She reclaims herself, going beyond the binary, by transgressing her humanness and becoming a godly, animalistic creature that questions the restrictive norms of the power structures we live in. She glitches between the human and the animal, slipping and shifting between reality and dream, becoming an empowering feminist fantasy.
Funded by: Mart Stam Gesellschaft
Shown at:
Vierte Welle Feminist Film Festival in Berlin
Freiburger Film Forum 2023
Text: Sylvia Plath & Jemima Foxtrot
Direction: Jemima Foxtrot & Maja Zagórska
Concept: Jemima Foxtrot & Maja Zagórska
Performer: Madeline Shann
Soundtrack: Joe Ackroyd
Animation and Edit: Maja Zagórska
Costume Design: Elin Laut
Prosthetics: Una Ryu
Camera: Charlotte Jacoby
1AD: Milena Bühring
Catering: Miriam Rumpel
VIDEO INSTALLATION / PERFORMANCE
2023
AIM is an embodied AI* specifically designed to experience pleasure. It is part of a Speculative Fiction scenario blurring the difference between human and machine and inspecting the strangely similar tropes around Artificial Intelligence and womanhood. Part of artists residency at Recycle Art, Brussel
concept and performance by Mia Hofner
found footage animation 3’13’’
2021
Is grooming a dog into a shape of a butterfly an abuse of power ?
„Forever Yours“ is a final product of an artistic research on creative pet grooming competitions. The experimental animation explores themes of commodification, consumer cycles, advertising culture and cuteness.
what was once alive, became inanimate matter
Dominance may be cruel and exploitative, with no hint of affection in it. What it produces is the victim. On the other hand , dominance may be combined with affection, and what it produces is a pet. How great is the temptation for the powerful to reduce their pets to simulacra of lifeless objects and mechanical toys - to the sort of frozen perfection that only the inanimate can attain.
Oficial selection at:
Filmfest Dresden 2022
Mobile Kino Berlin 2022
Maja Zagórska and Milena Bühring have developed several online performances within the framework of an online seminar, that deal with the change of understanding private and public spaces in times of the pandemic. The device that represented the only connection to the outside world at the time, the most private (PhotoBooth) and the most public place (Webex) at the same time.
Is the Webex space only a means to an end or can it be used artistically? The performances alienate the digital space and play, for example, with the strange feeling when the private is so close to the public that one can hardly distinguish them anymore.
The performances also explore fantasies of Big Brother and surveillance, push Webex misunderstandings to the point of absurdity and try to rethink the digital teaching space, away from frontal use and towards artistic use.
The Duo has also published a poem regarding this topic in Eigenart Magazine
https://eigenart-magazin.de/on-the-keyboard-webex-performances/
found footage video
4’40’’
2018
An attempt to understand the relationship between a living being and its representation . can we still consider ourselves as original roses ,or maybe the copies are already originals on their own ? have we ever been the real rose ? in which simulacrum are we living?
Berlin Short Film Festival 2018
Moscow Shorts 2018
B-Sides DIAMETRALE Experimental Film Festival 2019
CRAFT Film Festival Barcelona 2019
T͎h͎e͎ ͎T͎w͎o͎ ͎D͎i͎r͎e͎c͎t͎i͎o͎n͎s͎ ͎o͎f͎ ͎a͎ ͎S͎p͎l͎i͎t͎ , pop up video art show, Raw Temporaum, Berlin 2019
3D animation installation
2017
The world in the context of relation to the humanity is irrational and the mans biggest desire is to understand, to rationalize, to have clarity. The absurd juxtaposition of those two is where the nostalgia for something we will never achieve comes. Nostalgia for something we will never achieve, for something that we never had to begin with, for something that we are constantly looking for.
ongoing series of banal and less banal sketches
2015-…
