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The Pool
by Polina Kanis
2015, 9’37’
Presented at VISIO. Moving Images After Post-Internet (2019)
Courtesy of the artist
In a setting without any temporal or geographic reference, some people in bathing suits enter in the dark water of a swimming pool. They move slowly without communicating with one another, until they mysteriously vanish into nothing. The Pool is an haunting oneiric representation of reality and of the transient dimension of human life. In contrast with the present where living has become more and more hectic and hyper-connected, here men and women, like in a Dantesque retaliation, remain patiently waiting for their own inevitable disappearance.
Polina Kanis is a graduate of the Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia and of the Rodchenko Moscow Art School of Photography and Multimedia. In 2011 she was awarded the Kandinsky Prize in the Best Young Artist. In 2016 she received the Sergey Kuryokhin Award in the Media Object category for her video The Pool (2015). In her films each movement references the almost invisible routines, procedures, conventions, and mechanisms that are imposed on the human body and mind to make them conform to social protocols. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including a solo show in Haus der Kunst Munich (2017), the parallel program of Manifesta 10 and the 2015 edition of the Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art. In 2017—2018 she was a resident artist in the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten program in Amsterdam.