Ikon Eastside, 183 Fazeley Street, Digbeth, Birmingham, B5 5SE

Amongst the first generation of Polish artists to work with video, Józef Robakowski (born 1939) is a pioneer of independent Polish film. A founder member of numerous artists’ organisations, he was a professor at the Film, Television and Theatre State Academy in Łódz from 1970 to 1981, until removed from his position by the communist authorities and forbidden to either leave the country or show his work in Poland.

From the early 1970s Robakowski interrogated the language, material and mechanics of film, a structural approach corresponding closely to that developing in Britain and across Western Europe and North America during the same period. To this he brought a long-standing interest in Constructivist ideas and conceptualist avant-garde traditions, all filtered through a strong insistence on authenticity and personal identity.

My Very Own Cinema, a highly subjective body of work produced between 1970 and 2000, was described by the artist as “my way of remembering myself.” Its undercurrent is the ideological shift in Eastern Europe from socialism to capitalism and the paranoia of life under military rule in the 1980s. By filming the world around him and narrating everyday events and images in his own, often wryly humorous voice, he deployed a kind of personal resistance to the political situation imposed upon him.

From My Window, 1978–1999 (2000) was filmed over more than twenty years from Robakowski’s apartment. Looking down onto the public square below, his witty pseudo-documentary observes the daily activities of his neighbours and mass gatherings such as the annual May Day marches. The Market, (1970) is similarly observational, shot from high above the marketplace in Łódz. A single frame is exposed every five seconds between 7am and 4pm, recording the gradual build-up and decline of swarms of people.

These works are interspersed with a selection of Robakowski’s abstract works, such as Attention: LIGHT! (For Paul Sharits), a physically and perceptually affecting work made to the instructions of the American filmmaker – a close friend – shortly before his death. Such stylistic variety refects the artist’s determination not to allow his practice to stagnate, and thus limit him, but rather to engage in constant experimentation. However there is a constancy in his fundamental proposition, analysing the relationship between sound and image, while focusing on light as a metaphor for the transmission  of energy. “This is where I want my art to be: sometimes very close to reality, and sometimes just the opposite. Sometimes I want to sail around in some unknown space with the elements – for example light!”

Some of these works include flashing lights.

Józef Robakowski’s exhibition at Ikon Eastside – A Part of POLSKA! YEAR 2009–2010, www.PolskaYear.pl