Subway Pool Café
Katarina Zdjelar, WET Film
28. – 30.03.2025
Exhibition view Subay Pool Café with film selection by Wet Film. Photo: Job Willems
Katarina Zdjelar, Untitled (A Song), 2016, 20 minutes. Photo: Job Willems
Leszek Dawid, A Bar At The Victoria Station, 2003, 55 min, selected by Wet Film. Photo: Philip Graysc
Marta Romankiv, Immigrant, Take A Vote!, 2020, 16 min, selected by Wet Film. Photo: Philip Graysc
Katarina Zdjelar, Untitled (A Song), 2016, 20 minutes. Photo: Job Willems
Opening party of Het Zuid Manifest at Subway Pool Café. Photo: Job Willems
Subway Pool Café. Photo: Job Willems
Subway Pool Café. Photo: Job Willems
Subway Pool Café, a former cinema then transformed into a pool bar, was one of the locations of Het Zuid Manifest: I Love Carlos and hosted four video works: one by Katarina Zdjelar and three selected by WET Film. Subway Pool is a very special location in Charlois, accommodating leisure time for a diverse clientele since the 1990s, with a lovely interior that echoes a past that may never have existed. Subway Pool Café also hosted the opening party of Het Zuid Manifest: I Love Carlos.
In Untitled (A Song) (2016), Katarina Zdjelar records a group of four young musicians spending a night in a music studio. Nothing really happens, but this “nothingness” is impregnated with details and fragments, just like the silence is impregnated with noise and its musical organisation. Anxiety interlaces with harmony.
As it typically happens with Katarina Zdjelar’s videos, we are engaged in the placid duration of a self-enclosed and orchestrated situation. Bound by the tones and rhythms of the music or the spoken word, a temporal vacuum and a sense of expectancy are shaped, which take place in the social space of an extended in-betweenness. Zdjelar’s films work as some form of backstage to the ideological imaginary of these changing, dynamic, and accelerated times of ours. The artist consistently deals with alternative chrono-geographies, denouncing the flaws of the ideological acceleration, while unearthing its unrepresented realms. In her observations of the band at rest or at play, Zdjelar captures something we struggle to maintain, even in artistic practice – namely, inactivity, the freedom to inhabit an atemporal space as a necessary condition for creation, which is more than only production. Through the inactivity of waiting, through the temporary suspension of production, we stumble on “pure, disinterested play”, or more precisely “a space in which calculation and play appear to blur intoeach other”. It is precisely in its playful humming of possibility that Untitled (A Song) prompts us into action, or, more precisely, non-action, which we feel instinctively, is the only way forward, if action is to have consequence.
— Lucy Cotter
WET Film showed three films exploring various generations. Grandmamauntsistercat (2024) reimagines a matriarchal lineage through the eyes of a child. Originally intended as communist propaganda, the material is transformed into a site of auto-fictional memory, where the Slavic witch figure Baba Yaga emerges as a prehistoric goddess of resistance. On the brink of Poland’s accession to the EU, Mark and Piotek, two unemployed thirty-year-olds, leave their hometown in search for a better future in London. A Bar At The Victoria Station (2003) captures their struggles with economic hardship, homelessness, and the dream of building something of their own. In recent years, Poland has become one of the world’s leaders in accepting migrant workers, yet these individuals remain largely excluded from political participation. Immigrant, take a vote! (2020) examines this contradiction by staging an impossible event: a symbolic vote for non-citizens.
Anna Łuczak, one of the members of WET Film, is also showing one of her works in another Het Zuid Manifest location, Super Sam.
Zuza Banasińska is an artist and filmmaker from Warsaw, currently based in Amsterdam. Their essay films and installations explore archival materials and the ways knowledge is shaped and standardized. Educated in Kraków, Berlin, and Amsterdam, Banasińska has exhibited work internationally. Their work is currently supported by the Mondriaan Fund, Netherlands Film Fund and Stimuleringsfonds, and is distributed by Video Power and EYE Filmmuseum.
Leszek Dawid is a Polish filmmaker and educator. A graduate of Wrocław University and the Polish National Film, Television and Theatre School in Łódź, he has directed both documentaries and feature films, including Ki (2011) and You Are God (2012). His work has been recognized at festivals in Venice, Paris, and Kraków, among others.
Marta Romankiv is a Ukrainian interdisciplinary artist working with installation, video, and participatory art. Her work explores themes of nationality, citizenship, and social inequality, often blurring the lines between activism and artistic intervention. She studied in Lviv, Cracow, and Szczecin and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. She lives and works in Poland.
Katarina Zdjelar grew up in Belgrade and is currently based in Rotterdam. Working mainly in the medium of video, her work explores the way one body encounters another as a site of resistance and possibility, pointing to the fragile agency of collective action in the present. Voice, music, sound and language have been the core interests throughout her practice.