From Matter to Data: Ecology of Infrastructures  is an online film and video art screening series which places at its forefront the role imaginaries and realities of infrastructures play in works by several generations of artists and filmmakers from post-socialist countries. This series presents a selection of 15 works that will be made available in three parts from July 29 till September 9 at  post.moma.org, The Museum of Modern Art’s online resource devoted to art and the history of modernism in a global context. Each part of the series will be introduced by critical texts and followed by online discussions with the artists.

There will be two videos from Poland included in the series: Krzysztof Maniak’s Untitled (2013), and Bambi in Chernobyl (2014) by Angelika Markul (on view 08/27 – 09/09 2020).

In post-1989 East-Central Europe many of the artists have drawn relations between socialist industrial and architectural projects, biopolitical engineering and natural environments. Furthermore, in recent years, a number of artists from the region have started to focus on immaterial infrastructures, such as networks of servers, cloud computing, and data mining sites, revealing otherwise obscured ideological impact and environmental damage they exert. By foregrounding the complexity of selected works, the series seeks to highlight how certain ideas concerning retrospective as well as contemporary environmental and social challenges migrate through the region, sharing a lot in common, yet being impacted by different cultural and political contexts. 

Works by both emerging and acclaimed video artists and filmmakers presented in this series of screenings attempt to reconfigure the linear time positing infrastructures as confounded by a future utterly different from that which the narrative of the socialist progress once promised. They call to experience human-made material and immaterial agents as indexes of environmental oppression and provide a chance for an eco-critical reflection of the infrastructures emphasizing entanglements of anticipation and retrospection.

 Krzysztof Maniak is a video artist, a photographer and a performance artist whose work relies on interventions in natural landscapes, in which each action is linked to one of the seasons. Each series of actions is linked to one of the seasons. Maniak has created a subtle, meditative work of art without an audience, based on simple gesture.

Angelika Markul constructs meticulous installations, most of which constitute video projections. She particularly likes working in situ, site specific installations, in which she places special importance on light, and she often uses fluorescent lamps. The installations are built mainly using natural materials – above all wood  but also black foil. The source  for Markul’s artistic quests is full of mysteries nature hidden from human sight, like a secret life of plants and animals which passes unnoticed by man. Angelika Markul’s videos are strikingly understated, leaving open the question of whether the observed images recorded by the artist are real or were artificially created by her.

Organized and programmed by Lukas Brasiskis and Inga Lāce.

Participants: APART collective, Ieva Epnere, fantastic little splash, Flo Kasearu, Saodat Ismailova, Krzysztof Maniak, Angelika Markul, Deimantas Narkevičius, Bahar Noorizadeh, Oleksiy Radynski, Emilija Škarnulytė, Rasa Šmite and Raitis Šmits, Sophia Tabatadze, Krassimir Terziev, Ivar Veermäe.

 This film program is co-organized with the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Lithuanian Culture Institute and Lithuanian Cultural Attaché in New York, Consulate General of Estonia in New York, Polish Cultural Institute New York, and Consulate General of the Slovak Republic in New York.