Wojtek Doroszuk

Festin
HD video, 20’15”, 2013

The point of departure for the film Festin are masterpieces by 17th century Flemish animalists, among others, Frans Snyders, Jan and Ferdinand van Kessel, as well as a post-humanist mental experiment that evokes the vision of a world from which humans have disappeared.
The eponymous feast, during which the place of invited guests is taken by intruders is on the one hand a vanitas study demonstrating the collapse of the old order, while on the other, it is an image of life which timidly takes over a newly orphaned space. The film is a kind of epilogue, a continuation added to painting representations of feasts, while it refers at the same time to contemporary sceneries scattered all over the world: ghost cities, abandoned housing estates, places that cannot resist the passage of time.
Once famous for rich manor houses of utmost opulence, with restaurants and inns, Wrzeszcz is currently undergoing yet another transformation. We deliberately present the video in the vicinity of Politechniczna Street, which is witnessing a redevelopment – Nowa Politechniczna (New Politechniczna) is born, and for this reason many beautiful burgher houses are marked for demolition. The video features the motif of vanitas, which, in the context of NARRACJE, provokes a reflection on the impermanence and transience of urban architecture.

Wojciech Doroszuk (b. 1980), lives and works in Rouen (France).
Wojciech Doroszuk makes films, usually documentaries. He is interested in outsiders, extraordinary characters (e.g. a Turkish transsexual, a street poet from New York, a pathomorphologist – connoisseur of naive art) and unique places (such as the long-closed fairground in Ankara).
The film Festin refers to bestiaries in art, allegoric representations of animals shown e.g. by Flemish animalists, such as Frans Snyders, Paulus Potter, or the van Kessels: Jan and Ferdinand. Vanitas paintings (showing feasting dogs, insects swarming among the finest of foods) usually carry supplementary meaning: they show a world without people and the species-related hierarchies they impose. Doroszuk shows the culture-nature clash as visual and sound excess. Festin is a sophisticated trailer of the end of the world.
Wojciech Doroszuk is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow (interdisciplinary studio of Grzegorz Sztwiertnia and Zbigniew Sałaj). He also studied at Istanbul’s Sabanci Universitesi.
His works have been presented at numerous shows in Poland and abroad, at the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Location One in New York, or Marina Abramovic Institute in San Francisco.