Operators’ Exercises: Open Form Film and Architecture explores the surprising and productive relationship between Polish experimental film and architecture in the late 1960s and early 1970’s. The exhibition traces the evolution of Polish architect Oskar Hansen’s theory of Open Form from its origin in Hansen’s own architectural projects to its application in film, multi-slide projection, visual games, and performative practices.

Led by artists Zofia Kulik and Przemys?aw Kwiek a group of Hansen’s students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw pursued Open Form as the basis for a collective, communication oriented production. Through a strategy they described as “working with the camera” the artists recorded indeterminate actions and ephemeral performances coordinated in relation to the camera’s field of view. The projects in the exhibition offer evidence of these artists’ fascination with objective documentation, mathematics, logic, and cybernetics, which, in their work, emerged as procedures for non-authorial interactions. The artists conceived their practice as a radical form of social experimentation that would examine the values and models of a non-authoritarian social system and that would offer a form of interference to contemporary politics and propaganda.