In the years 1971 – 1987, Przemysław Kwiek and Zofia Kulik worked together as an influ­en­tial artistic duet known as “KwieKu­lik”. Part­ners not only at work but also privately, they were fam­ous as avid crit­ics of the real­ity in the Pol­ish People’s Repub­lic and one of the most import­ant avant-​gardists in the coun­try. After 1987 they split up leav­ing vast archives – a true treas­ury of inform­a­tion on their joint activity.

Anna Zakrzewska and Joanna Tur­ow­icz, the authors of KwieKu­lik, fol­low the two artists as they pre­pare a ret­ro­spect­ive exhib­i­tion of their works. Non­ethe­less, it is not yet another film about art in which, one after another, “talk­ing heads” (crit­ics, his­tor­i­ans, the­or­eti­cians) ana­lyse and inter­pret the works of the duet. Zakrzewska and Tur­ow­icz decided to adopt a per­sonal per­spect­ive. They talk about clashes between the prot­ag­on­ists which arise when they select works for the exhib­i­tion, and about their atti­tude towards the real­ity of today and towards everything the artist left behind.


The past resur­faces con­stantly. What passed is elev­ated, some­times works as a memory of bet­ter times con­tras­ted with the present. At one point Kulik tells her ex-​partner to ‘for­get that he has achieved any­thing and to oppose that real­ity bare’. Przemysław Kwiek answers proudly, ‘I won’t’, but it is hard not to get the impres­sion that this act of rebel­lion is streaked with hope­less­ness. Also the form of the film itself expresses the over­lap­ping of the past and the present, a con­stant ten­sions between the two. Frag­ments of artists’ activ­ity recor­ded by a cam­era were weaved into KwieKu­lik: some­times because the prot­ag­on­ists remembered them, some­times without any motives from the rep­res­en­ted world. Lack­ing titles and descrip­tions, the archival frag­ments built into the struc­ture of the film con­front that what used to be with the present moment, two dif­fer­ent eras con­stantly inter­pen­et­rate.


In KwieKu­lik, it is not always pos­sible to sep­ar­ate the sphere of art from the banal space of routine. In a very rep­res­ent­at­ive scene, the artists, arguing about the under­stand­ing of the baroque, sud­denly changed the sub­ject to the gas bill (even though they are not together any more, they live next to each other and share the bills). The sac­red, the feel­ing of lofti­ness and esthet­ical ela­tion have to give place to oblig­a­tions the every­day real­ity imposes on us.


The approach taken by the authors allows to cre­ate new con­texts around the works of the duet, but also makes us pose more gen­eral ques­tions among them the ones about the valid­ity of cer­tain atti­tudes and the need to recre­ate ones approach towards the real­ity. From the extens­ive foot­age (both new and archival shots), Zakrzewska and Tur­ow­icz man­aged to edit an inter­est­ing story about the rela­tion­ships with the past and the attempts to tame the present.



By Bolesław Racięski


(Trans­la­tion by Olga Brawańska)

(17.05.2011)