ANETA BARTOS
Aneta Bartos was born in Poland and moved to New York City where she attended The School of Visual Arts. Most recently she opened a solo show Monotropa Terrain at Postmasters Gallery in NYC and was part of a major group exhibition, Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Centre in London, which toured to Les Reconstres d’Arles, Martin Gropius-Bau in Berlin and FOMU in Antwerp. Her recent solo exhibitions include Monotropa Terrain at Tommy Simoens Gallery in Antwerp, Aneta Bartos: Family Portrait 2015-2018 at Tommy Simoens Gallery, and Family Portrait at Postmasters Gallery in New York.
Recent group exhibitions include Give and Give at Franken Rosen Museum, Argentina; Pairs at Pace/MacGill Gallery, and Family Values curated by Kate Bush at Calvert 22, London. Bartos’s work has been reviewed and featured in New York Magazine, W Magazine, Interview Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, The Sunday Times, Modern Painters, as well as online publications such as Artforum, Vulture, Artinfo, Hyperallergic, Art in America, and The Huffington Post, among others. She was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2017 and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2019. She is currently working on her first monograph, Tarantiz, published by Ludion.
MONOTROPA TERRAIN
2021
12:51
film
Set in the dark world of the Monotropa, a plant known as ’ghost pipe’, the seemingly amphibious characters portrayed in Bartos’ film appear to be in embryonic process of taking form, merging or splitting, as if trying to form a hybrid, dual form of a creature. Moving through plant-infested lakes and puddles of mud, the symbiotic movements remind us of the sensual and mysterious ballets often seen in early documentaries on cell reproduction, or fungus and insect life.
The Monotropa plant is often mistaken for a fungus, due to its white, ghostly appearance. It lacks chlorophyll, which gives plants their green color, hence it doesn’t feed on photosynthesis. Monotropa can grow in dark, dense forest floors covered by leaves and debris. It creates a hybrid relationship with fungi that produce sugar by parasitizing on photosynthetic plants. It tricks the fungi into feeding them, effectively reversing the traditional food chain.
Shot on Super 8, the film Monotropa Terrain is a continuation of Bartos’ former series Spider Monkeys I and II, a series equally showing dualistic beings, half-human and half-animal, entangled in psychological landscapes. Where her choice for expired Polaroid film for the artist’s acclaimed photography series Family Portrait was a deliberate choice of medium to recreate childhood memories, the choice of Super 8 film as medium to shoot Monotropa Terrain again proved to be in line with the film’s subjects.
The film’s blurry panning, the slowed-down scenes which cause images to almost “split”, the changing in and out of focus all seem to be consistent with the apparent changes its characters are going through. (At times it feels as if watching something alive in a still developing Polaroid.) Meanwhile the women on screen all seem to be versions of a common self, as if they are performing different versions of the same persona.
