The Forgetting of Proper Names

In rural Poland the custom of renting professional mourners to appear at funerals prevails, their sung laments used to accentuate grief. For Anna Molska's film 'The Mourners', one of a generous selection of works by three early career Polish artists, she invited a group of these women into the cold vault-like gallery of the Centre for Polish Sculpture. Her camera watches as the close-knit group loosen into their seemingly purposeless occupation, talking of deaths both known and overheard, and dancing to stay warm, before lapsing into sorrowful song in front of a white sheet sculpturally fashioned to figure a dead man.

The choice piece in this group show, Molska's graceful portrait brings to the fore a thread that weaves throughout these practices - the reimagining of the past in direct relation to art's history. Melancholic and ruminating on issues of remembrance, Agnieszka Polska's monochromatic video 'Sensitisation to Colour' documents a 1968 performance by seminal Polish conceptualist Wlodzimierz Borowski. Similarly, her oneiric sequence 'Plunderer's Dream', a resplendent animation of illustrations from old textbooks and magazines, takes its lead from the post-war recollections of her grandfather.

Working in a different register, Wojciech Bakowski's abstracted animation (housed within a small one-viewer cabin), sound-piece and graphic works, comprise documents of a personal neurosis. An audio of a microphone ceaselessly scratching off a stubbly chin sits alongside dream-like translations of blotted patterns and geometric shapes, poetically drawing the viewer into a more idiosyncratic realm.

The effect of Bakowski's drawings comes to characterise the slightly off-kilter tone of the works on show, and although the showcase-like nature of this exclusively Polish exhibition is limiting, it remains an accomplished selection.