since the late 1960s, dóra maurer's work has revolved around movement and displacement as conceptual features of systems. the starting point is always a clearly defined structure, the repetition of which reveals unexpected deviations, breaks, and anomalies. this principle characterizes her graphic works as well as her films, spatial works, and so-called “quasi-images”—visual artifacts to which she herself does not assign a fixed ontological status.

in maurer's films from 1973 onwards, movement is initially measured and organized serially, and later increasingly used as a means of analytical image exploration. everyday actions, abstract forms, or elementary cinematic parameters serve as source material, the repetition of which leads to astonishing displacement effects. this method is universal, i.e., it can be applied to a wide variety of subject areas without being explicitly political. implicitly, however, it also addresses the possibility of “exiting” the system—something that, almost 40 years after the end of actually existing socialism, seems even more urgent than in the days of state communism.

maurer's experiments, which challenge established systems, often begin with the seemingly trivial and everyday. in the film angelernte unwillkürliche bewegungen (1973), a simple scene—a woman reading and making casual gestures—is played out in four structural variations. through temporal stretching, superimposition, parallelization, and negative/positive intertwining, it becomes apparent that repetition hardly ever creates identity, but rather reveals deviation. idömèrès [timing] (1973–80) applies this principle to the measurement of space and time: despite fixed parameters, the serial folding of a white cloth leads to increasing asynchrony, thus relativizing the idea of objective measurability. in relative schwingungen (1973–75), maurer analyzes the relationship between movement and perception using the example of a swinging lamp: the object and the gaze attempting to follow it become entangled in increasingly complex patterns of relationship by means of a sophisticated split-screen technique. with regard to the resulting process, maurer once said in another context: “i only set it in motion, but i [do] not ‘make it.’”

in the 1980s, the musical structure of movement and the thinking behind it in sequences and series became even more central. kalah (1980) transforms a board game into an abstract synthetic composition using specific color and sound coding. triolets (1980) consistently permutes the trinity of space, focal length, and pitch: as if every space, no matter how elementary, were always permeated by—in this case, cross-media—contradictions. the shifts that take place within these cross-currents are also clearly manifested in raumbemalung – projekt buchberg (1982–83) and inter-images (1989–90). both films reveal the dialectic of systematicity and anomaly (which cannot be eradicated from it) evoked by maurer. what remains is always a resistant residue—as excess movement, as displacement, as deviance generated by the system itself.

a direct connection between dóra maurer and ryszard waśko is that the latter began his artistic career at the łódź film workshop, which in the early 1970s was dedicated to exploring the structural properties of the medium of film. the works chodnik [pavement](1973) and gimnastyka [gymnastics] (1974) shown in the exhibition relate to this context. similar to maurer's cinematic oeuvre, waśko's works focus centrally on the time-, space-, and perception-structuring properties of the medium—and here again on decidedly “system-breaking” aspects. for the majority of waśko's works presented here, however, the medium of film is significant in a different way, namely as an intermedial reference foil to which the photographic and collage works often refer in unexpected manner.

while the series negative positive things (1972) contains the minimal version of a cinematic flip image—two black-and-white frames, one negative and one positive, placed vertically on top of each other—róg [a corner] (1976) leaves the cinematic apparatus of representation grasping at thin air: as the structure transposed into the medium of photography shows, the corner of the room shown on the monitor is simply not congruent with the corner located in real space behind the monitor.

four dimensional photography (1972) uses serialization of one and the same shot with simultaneous changes in exposure time to create a kind of second-order moving image. the image sequences, whether five, six, or eight parts, do not show conventional film frames, but rather an increasingly distorted, even “blurred” scenario—as if to indicate a creeping break with or within the suggested continuum of representation. in this respect, the series points ahead to the broken film works of the 1980s. in these, any claim to representation is completely suspended. the only formal guideline in these collages is the material of an (unexposed) celluloid strip, which is rearranged in various forms of superimposition according to time- and rhythm-related criteria.

intertextually (or intermedially, as one might say), the organizational unit “film strip” also serves as the starting point here. however, as in the acrylic paintings black and blue film no. 1 and black and red film no. 1 (both 1983), the result is film-related structures of a higher order that bear little resemblance to the medium in the conventional sense. in the 1960s and 1970s, such a transgression of media boundaries would probably have been labeled “expanded cinema.” however, waśko's cross-genre practice is too subtle or “vectorial”—reaching out in a wide variety of directions—to be pinned down to a single label.

this is also evident in his works time sculpture at black paint (1986) and discontinuous black – arch sculpture (1987), which are created with acrylic paint on wood. here, too, the film strip may have provided an important impulse as a distant guiding force. however, the wooden sculptures have completely “absorbed” this form of media reference and, in the process, transformed it into a different form of mediality. this is another example of the sublime way in which waśko, like maurer, allows genre-specific systems to transcend themselves.

christian höller