Anna Łuczak is a visual artist, performer and film maker from Łódź, Poland. She lives and works in Rotterdam, Charlois. The Netherlands. Europe. Through her projects she explores subjective, fragmented and intuitive approaches to collective histories and their influence to daily life. In 2018, together with Erika Roux, Marta Hryniuk, Nick Thomas and Sophie Bates she has co-founded WET (www.wetfilm.org) Rotterdam-based production and distribution cooperative for film, video and artists' moving image with monthly online screenings.
Open Studio - Works produced together with Jakob Forster during one month residency at Yellow Brick Studio in Athens. Experiments with slip-casting and reliefs in porcelain around the ideas of the future. Project originated from our shared experiences of working as dishwashers in multiple locations in and around Rotterdam directly and many years after graduating from art school.
Open studio - Works produced together with Jakob Forster during one month residency at Yellow Brick Studio in Athens. Experiments with slip-casting and reliefs in porcelain around the ideas of the future. Project originated from our shared experiences of working as dishwashers in multiple locations in and around Rotterdam directly and many years after graduating from art school.
Imagine Preference - Wild Summer of Art, Brutus, Rotterdam, 2022.
A piece of fabric dipped in a porcelain clay after firing process becomes a hyper realistic solid copy of what previously was a textile piece. Mostly women were hired in the textile factories, struggling in close to no labor rights. Now Łódź, formerly known as s city of textile magnates glamorizes its industrial past, omitting the often very difficult work conditions.
Hotel Savoy, publication, digital print, edition of 200 - part of the video installation, Hotel Savoy, with The Best Spatzle in Town, by Olga Hohmann, and an interview with Andrzej Leder, design: Hagen Verleger
Hotel Savoy, WET, Hillevliet, Rotterdam, 2022 - publication Hotel Savoy —alongside the video installation it accompanies—is an attempt to symbolically ‘get inside’ the 1918 novel Hotel Savoy, by the Austrian writer Joseph Roth. It is also an attempt to enter the hotel itself, described by Roth in the book, and filmed by me in the present day: the choice to depict the same place from a distance of a hundred years allowing me to see the parallels between the two realities. The novel is an elegy for a Europe which was disintegrating and aggregating into small nation states, in which the author could no longer find himself; Roth did not see himself as an Austrian Jew, but as a citizen of the multicultural Habsburg Empire stretching from Vienna to the edge of Russia. On his way back from the front of the First World War, Roth stayed at the eponymous hotel in Łódź, my home town, and encountered the flotsam of Europe at its most existential.
Emotional Channel Goes Solo, Upominki, Rotterdam, 2021 - For Eva, glazed porcelain
Emotional Channel Goes Solo, Upominki, Rotterdam 16.12.21-31.01.2022 - Upominki means gifts. Emotional Channel goes solo shared and offered services. Working together with women at different stages of their life, I have collected affirmations for the New Year. With the help of Weronika Zielińska and her daughter, Lilly Klein, we shared our messages on hand casted porcelain plates. The tradition of collecting porcelain “souvenir plates” was first reserved for monarchs and royalty, but since the XIX century it has spread in homes on a large scale to commemorate important moments of collective life.
Feelings Are Real (Its True), Galerie Anton Janizewski, Berlin, 2021 - Group exhibition hosted by Olga Hohmann and Jan Koslowski at Gallerie Anton Janizewski in Berlin. Exhibition functioned as an art salon with regular dinner performances. I have developed a set of 43 hand casted porcelain plates, cups and 6 hand build ceramic candle holders to be used by visitors during these gatherings.
Milk Bar, Emotional Channel at Olga’s Flat, Berlin, 2020 - mixed media installation made out of acrylic- and wool yarns, air-drying clay, cardboard, cotton- and polyester fabrics, disco ball motor, glazed porcelain, laser-heated transfer prints, plaster, silkscreen prints, and pine wood. The table sizes vary from
60 – 120 cm. long.
We were not hired for deliveries, but a temp worker riding through the city landscape on their bike once told us; ‘When there were no deliveries to go out they put me in the dining room and back kitchen washing dishes. They would let us drivers go home early when there were not enough deliveries, which made us lose payment but gave me more time. Does flexibility always have to come with zero sense of security?’ If you can, what do you put on your plate, in the short circuit, or should we say the current freak show of the gig economy? Milk Bar takes a ghost-like approach to neoliberal food economies via Calabasas avocados and concepts from strongly labor-driven nation-states; such as Poland and Sweden where milk bars were introduced during the first half of the 20th century as ‘bar mleczny’ and ‘mjölkbar’.
Deferred feelings, Distorted Emotions, together with Olga Hohman, Pracownia Portretu, Łódź, 2020 - Under the umbrella topic Deferred Feelings / Distorted Emotions, we have devoted ourselves to the question of what it means when one’s own desire is foreign to oneself – for example because it is located within a social normativity that you believe to have overcome. In the process, we developed concepts that were even unknown to ourselves, such as the idea of “Accidental Queerness”.
In its capacity to repeatedly surprise even its authors, the video work and performance Neither Touching Nor Funny is thus above all one thing: a manifesto for contradiction. This is also supported by the narrator’s voice, which is difficult to localize because you never know who is speaking – is it one of the two female subjects who expresses herself? Or both of them? Is it their (false) desire? Or is it perhaps even the internet or another cultural machinery that is responsible for that desire?
