Voracious Cats

Probably the most notorious work by Natalia LL, Consumer Art presents models delighting in bananas, frankfurters or ice-cream. Obviously, this seemingly innocent activity acquires a strongly erotic edge. Combination of a “cold” film recording with a “hot” sensual motif stands for a rejection of the purely analytical character of conceptual art.

“Impressions” provides an image of conscious corporeality – an image that was rare in the art of Poland under Communism. The work is a joyful spontaneous story about female subjectivity, a film self-portrait of the artist.

The work resulted from one of photographic and film seances, as the artist called them. The use of the procedures of multiplication and the mutual overlapping of semitransparent images on photographic film produces the impression of movement: veiling and unveiling the private parts of the body, but also a sense of artificiality and subversion inherent in photography and film that records the image of reality and “falsifies” it at the same time.

At the end of the 1970s, the artist’s work witnesses a change and enters the spheres of mysticism, mythology and cosmology. Yet, the body continues to function as her primary medium and the performances were seldom performed directly for the camera, although the awareness and necessity of film documentation was obvious for the artist. The first of a cycle of those seances, titled Dreaming, was conducted in 1978. The actions adopted different forms – Natalia LL was asleep in the presence of the viewers or only with the camera as a witness; she was also experimenting with sleeping in the pyramid. Those seances stemmed from the pursuit of reaching the subconscious – the artist very often noted down her dreams immediately after waking up.

experimental short film

In this work Natalia LL impersonates for the first time Brunhilde – a character from Nordic mythology, the heroine of the opera Valkyrie by Richard Wagner, the artist’s favourite composer. Through the brave heroine she talks about the transience, ultimate matters, meeting of Eros and Tanatos. She uses a banana, a symbol of sexuality familiar from her earlier works, as well as kales and skulls, well-known symbols of death.

experimental short film