Pavlína Morganová

As Tomasz Załuski put it in his essay On Art History and Its Advantages for Living, Józef Robakowski is a one-man institution: he is an extraordinary multimedia artist, gallerist and archivist at the same time. In 1979 he founded along with Małgorzata Potocka The Exchange Gallery. Located in their studio apartment on the 9th floor of the Łódź tenement building called Manhattan, it invited artist to exchange ideas in original presentations as well as all kinds of textual and visual archival records.

Now into his 80s, the artist accepted the group on Friday evening and generously answered all our questions about the history of the Workshop of Film Form, The Exchange Gallery and his own work. I was especially interested in the series of his famous films From My Window shot from the windows of the apartment from 1978 until 1990s. Robakowski started to film the series on film camera and later in 1980s switched to video camera. His apartment is not just witness of many artistic experiments, exchanges, exhibitions, but also the site of creation of his extraordinary audiovisual pieces.