The exhibition "Migrant avant-garde. Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas, Franciszka Themerson, Stefan Themerson" presented at the Szklarnia Gallery is an encouragement to look at the sources of the avant-garde, to reflect on the achievements of those who were in their twenties while creating their own film artistic manifestos, and were therefore peers of most of the current students of the Lodz Film School. The exhibition reminds us that regardless of the time in which artists live and create, even when acting in the most radical ways, their art can still have an impact. Despite the passage of time, it speaks of the universality of the message, where parallel contexts emerging with subsequent generations of creators can trigger new forms and develop film structures belonging to the universe of art. Although only a fragment of the vast range of film, photographic, drawing, sound and literary achievements of these avant-garde creators is being presented, we deeply believe in the sense of expanding knowledge about the past, which is to serve the continuous acquisition of awareness of the basics of creating film, but not only the avant-garde.

The common denominator for the diverse avant-garde film community both in the world and in Poland was the fight to treat avant-garde cinema as art. Among the representatives of the Polish film avant-garde, its most important representatives are Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, whose work has become a colourful, multi-threaded background for presenting the artistic activities and the creators themselves, the American avant-garde Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas. The key element of the exhibition is the nomadism of the artists, which resulted in mutual transplants, and exchanges of thoughts and ideas, which left a lasting trace, triggering the actions of subsequent generations of artists on their way to defining their own alphabet of art, thus creating a captivating universe of art.

This Friday, 23, February, at 5 p.m., as part of the programme related to the MIGRANT AVANT-GARDE exhibition, there will be a screening of two iconic works of the avant-garde - films by Maya Deren:

▶️ "Meshes of the Afternoon"(1943) and
▶️ "At Land"(1944).

The films will be shown from original 16mm prints from the LIGHT CONE archive. lightcone.org/en/film

Note:
The guests of the show will be Monika Talarczyk - Ph.D., professor of our School, a film historian, researcher of women's cinema and Aleksandra Jeglińska, curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. We invite you to this unique show and the discussion with our guests.

We will inform you about further events related to the MIGRANT AVANT-GARDE exhibition.

Exhibition curators:
Anna Maria Leśniewska
Wojciech Puś

MIGRANT AVANT-GARDE
16.02 – 15.03. 2024
Szklarnia Gallery, Lodz Film School

photos: Mikołaj Zacharow