Performance: Stories for Mechanic Bodies

We live in a world undergoing rapid technological and societal change, the informational current shapes physical objects and bodies, drowning everything in a solution of the real and the hallucinatory.

In this new environment, the ancient technology of storytelling plays a special role, it governs the workings of the system while itself undergoing inevitable transformation.

In her new lecture performance “Stories for Mechanic Bodies” (2025), Agnieszka Polska uses cinematic found-footage materials as a backdrop to reflect on the Story, and its role in shaping the emotional infrastructures of past and present, its evolution, and its uncanny ability to predict its own future.

Agnieszka Polska’s lecture performance is commissioned by Moderna Museet in conjunction with her participation in the ongoing exhibition “The Subterranean Sky“.

Agnieszka Polska

Agnieszka Polska (born 1985 in Lublin, Poland, lives and works in Berlin) is known for her analytical and hypnotic video installations. At the core of her practice is the question of the individual within the collective. Often reflecting on her own role, and on the function of the artist in society, Polska probes the ethical ambiguities of being both shaped by and shaping shared reality. Her works expose the tensions between universality and subjectivity, while tracing the mechanisms that govern them—image, technology, language, poetry, imagination, and perception.

Agnieszka Polska’s recent solo exhibitions include Flowers on the Sun, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (2024); A Thousand Year Plan, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2021); and Where Have You Been So Long?, La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2021).