I Love You Life

I Love You Life at G3 BWA Wrocław Main Station gallery is an exhibition by Agnieszka Chojnacka, selected through an open call organised by the institution. The multifaceted exhibition focuses on a film in the form of a science fiction essay, drawing on the road movie genre and exploring the relationships between art, memory and nature.

The project’s starting point is a film that was begun before the COVID-19 pandemic and then continued over the period of several years with the support of the artist’s friends and acquaintances. It tells the story of an alien travelling through deserted Polish museums after the end of humanity. The protagonist, who is also the narrator, acts like an explorer of an extinct civilisation, constructing various scenarios and conjectures about the human species based on artefacts discovered in the museums encountered along the way. Selected modernist artworks occupy a special place in the film, becoming co-protagonists in the narrative.

References to family comedies, science fiction, horror movies and historical melodramas intertwine with allusions to art history. Constructivism is juxtaposed with the aesthetics of Romanticism. Avant-garde sculptures emerge from the darkness to the rhythm of excerpts from Richard Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung, while the film’s narrator – a likeable extraterrestrial – suffers from the rare condition known as Stendhal syndrome, brought on by confrontations with modern art.

The remaining works in the exhibition were created specifically for the BWA Wrocław gallery space and develop themes explored in the film. Two of the objects, replicas of sculptures by Katarzyna Kobro also featuring in the film’s narrative, have been subjected to biological processes. Created in collaboration with molecular biologists, the works are the result of laboratory experiments in which sculpture is confronted with organic compounds.

The third element of the exhibition is a series of photographic collages that develop hypothetical scenarios for the afterlives of museum artefacts. The works depict possible transformations of artworks as they function beyond their original cultural context.

In I Love You Life, the film, objects and collages come together to form a multilayered narrative about the possible afterlife of art following the end of mankind – its endurance despite the disappearance of the world in which it was created.

Agnieszka Chojnacka

– visual artist, lecturer and co-head of the Conceptual Art Studio at the Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź. Her practice encompasses a variety of media, selected according to the subject she explores. She is interested in questions relating to the human condition, our inner lives and place in the world around us. She received her doctoral degree in art in 2022. Her scholarships include support from Arts Council England, the Mayor of Łódź, Strasbourg Club, Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage. Her works are held in the collection of the Museum of Art in Łódź. She lives and works in Łódź.