"Theory of Seeing" | four-part film series
Theory of Seeing is a four-part film series that attempts to bring Władysław Strzemiński’s book to the screen. The aim, however, is not to illustrate its theses, but to translate them into the language of moving images. The starting point is the premise that seeing is not an unchangeable ability, but a process shaped by history and the social conditions of life. Each era creates its own unique ways of seeing and art participates in these transformations.
Translating Theory of Seeing into film demands more than simply presenting the notions contained within it. Film is not a transparent medium, but an apparatus that organizes the act of seeing through framing, editing, movement, light and time. It is therefore a tool through which Strzemiński’s ideas can be put to a practical test, demonstrating how a picture emerges at the intersection of the eye, memory, knowledge and experience. Each episode becomes an experiment, which does not so much explain the theory as set it in motion.
This project fits within the tradition of experimental films about art, in which the camera is not used to reproduce artworks, but becomes an analytical tool. A key reference is The Film Form Workshop in Łódź which treats film as a laboratory of perception, investigating the relationship between the apparatus and the viewer. Another precedent is John Berger’s and Mike Dibb’s television series Ways of seeing, which used the serial format to critically examine the social and political conditions of looking at art.
Each episode offers an original contemporary interpretation of Strzemiński’s thought. Wilhelm Sasnal connects museum conservation and the materiality of a picture with the memory of the Holocaust, asking about the limits of abstraction in relation to historical experience. Mykola Ridnyj confronts the theory of moving vision with the optics of war, relating it to the history of Strzemiński’s physical impairment and a fictional story about a sniper. Agnieszka Polska transposes his insights into the cybernetic context, the attention economy, and images generated by artificial intelligence. Anton Vidokle and Liam Gillick treat the book’s theses as a series of exercises performed by an actor, a camera and a city. The series is held together by titular sequences created by Laura Pawela using found footage.
The series joins a constellation that has been taking shape over several decades and includes Strzemiński’s book, the historical space of the Neoplastic Room, the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź’s permanent collection display Ways of Seeing and contemporary interpretations formulated through film. It will be complemented by a website dedicated to the book and the series, prepared in collaboration with e-flux and featuring source materials as well as new texts by Luiza Nader and Elena Vogman.
Each element serves a different function: the book articulates a theory of transformations in visual consciousness, the films put its concepts to a contemporary test, the exhibitions allow them to be examined through a physical encounter with artworks in the museum space, and the website opens up a field for further research and interpretation. The elements of the constellation do not form a linear sequence, but explain and update one another. Theory of Seeing thus becomes not a closed treatise, but a still-active tool and a script for experiments in how we see and in what we have yet to learn how to see.
Project: Theory of Seeing, realized as part of the Kultura Inspirująca 2025–2026 Programme, in collaboration with e-flux and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.
Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland as part of the Kultura Inspirująca 2025–2026 Programme.
