RENATA POLJAK

Film maker and visual artist

ARTIST TALK

Monday, February 14^th, 2022

6 – 8 p.m. @ Webex

To register please send an email to: k.leko@udk-berlin.de

In her artist talk, Croatian film maker and visual artist Renata Poljak will focus on feminist aspects of her work. By screening her selected film material, she will make us delve into a specific socio-geographical space of Southern Slavic Europe in which open see and emigration has made impact ever since. In her several films, geographic places become protagonists of complex narratives, while female figures, often solitary, are being confronted with loss, detachment, and distance. Renata Poljak’s works in the medium of still and moving images, and she uses their metaphorical potential to refer to divers political, economic, and social phenomena in a specific context yet revealing their universality. Her works are built upon elements of her own biography; she uses first person narration, archival and documentary materials, as well as everyday situations to transform them into complex and intriguing motives. Poljak’s works contemplate notions of memory and oblivion, and talk about ways history, different ideologies, and political agendas have been constructed and disseminated.

Renata Poljak (b. 1974, Split, Croatia) graduated from the Academy of Arts in Split, after which she studied at the Ecole Regionale des Beaux-Arts in Nantes. She lived and worked for many years in Paris; participated in residencies such as Art in General (New York), Art OMI (New York), RU (New York) and Skowhegan (Maine), also MQ in Vienna and Recollet and Cite des Arts (Paris); and was visiting artis at San Francisco Art Institute in 2002. She has received numerous accolades for her work: for Great Expectations she won the Best Film Award at the festival Black Box in Berlin, and her video work Directing Actors / Directing Beliefs won the T-HT Competition Award at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb (2012). For Porvenir she received five awards at film festivals throughout 2020 and 2021. In 2006 her work was commissioned by TBA21 Vienna for Kuba project. In 2010 Poljak showed a substantial selection of her films at the screening program of Prospective Cinema at the Centre Georges Pompidou and in October 2012 at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Her solo exhibition at the Stephan Stoyanov Gallery in New York was listed by New York weekly The Village Voice as one of the three best exhibitions to see in New York in January 2013, while a notable retrospective of her works in November 2014 opened simultaneously in two art centers in Montreal - Optica and Occurrence. During 2016/17 Renata had five museum solo shows followed by artist book entitled Don’t Turn Your Back On Me published by Verlag für moderne Kunst, Vienna. Her three recent films Yet Another Departure (2018), Porvenir (2020) and Split (2021) premiered at Oberhausen Short Film Festival three times in row. Her works have been included in several museum and private collections.

Images:

Still images from films Ó Renata Poljak

Porvenir, film, 12’, 2020

Yet Another Departure, film, 12’, 2018

Partenza, film/video installation, 12’, 2016