My practice draws on the concepts of community, space and technology. I seek to merge my background in Expanded Cinema with socially focused interactions.
Influenced by Expanded Cinema, my work attempts to move beyond the single screen setup of conventional filmmaking and instead emphasises the perception of the projection as a physical experience to create more participatory roles for the viewer. Often using performance, video, film, Internet, public intervention and a broader form of documentary work, I am interested how the audience receive and respond to these events. Influenced by the activities of the London Film-Makers Co-operative (1966-1999) and inspired by its collaborative and supportive form of production, I am also a founder member of collective-iz, an all-female London based experimental filmmakers collective. I have participated in screenings and events around the UK and Europe as well as worldwide.
(art)work
HD Video / 17:05 min / 2016
‘(art)work’ is a collection of audiovisual material collected whilst working as an art guard at a major contemporary art event in Berlin 2016. A mobile phone was used to capture daily scenes of the workplace in various venues. I later interviewed colleagues about their experiences and reflections of the job, as well as their individual situations as creative practitioners / thinkers.
I used this time to explore the meaning of this type of work and the relationship workers have with their surroundings. Conversations with my colleagues voice various perspectives and anecdotes of people who spend regular and long intervals in a workplace where they are normally regarded as peripheral figures in the context of institutions and museums. These people take centre stage in the piece. The title ‘artwork’ and the act of creating the piece (using the accessibility of the mobile phone), also explores the conditions in which creative practitioners / thinkers maintain a ‘productive state’ within various jobs and responsibilities.
Skype Call
HD Video / 09:30 min / 2011
‘Skype Call’ explores the themes of identity, place, and the presence in the live, in which distance and contact play a central role. It has been previously carried out as a live performance in collaboration with my sister, Anna Raczynski and conducted simultaneously in front of an audience in London and Berlin using a webcam, more recently the transmission took place between London and Colne (Lancashire) as part of the ‘PORTRAITS’ programme organised by collective-iz at New River Studios, London. Influenced by Expanded Cinema and specifically Guy Sherwin’s ‘Paper Landscape’ 1975 (2016), this piece uses the liveness and immediacy of the Internet to close the space-time gap electronically.
"Fight, fight, fight back!"
HD Video / 03:00 min / 2010
The two makers of the film, one behind the camera (Deniz Johns) and the other behind the white board (Karolina Raczynski) are walking in and recording the student protest at Parliament Square on the 9th December 2010. The blank white board operates in two ways, firstly as a blank placard in the protest, denying a slogan but acting as a reflective screen and secondly as the video is projected on the same board as a live performance event, it becomes a vehicle to carry in the protest into the auditorium.
The viewer enters into a game of concealing and revealing, never seeing the woman behind the board or the woman behind the camera. Sometimes the white of the board fills the screen, and at other times the edges break off, revealing the events around. As the screen is filled with the white board the attention of the viewer focuses on the surrounding sounds and the voice of the students.
Pusty Stan / Empty State
HD Video / 17:04 min / 2014
The installation entitled ‘Pusty Stan / Empty State’ carried out together with artist filmmaker Anna Raczynski, is the outcome of a four-month research project that examined the process of change for people living and working on the street Święty Marcin in Poznań, Poland. One of the main issues that emerged from the many conversations collected over the period of the artist residency is that of vacant buildings, be it in the past, present or future. The material addresses the state of the city centre, the problem of empty buildings and the transformations of the main street. In light of this, the presentation took place in the form of a four-channel audio visual installation in the empty building of the former Raczynski library, currently one of several vacant buildings located on the street Święty Marcin.