Agnieszka Polska's 'The Thousand-Year Plan' at MSN Warsaw explores electrification's ideological currents

Agnieszka Polska's two-channel video installation 'The Thousand-Year Plan' (2021) is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN) from 2 July to 19 September 2021. The immersive work interrogates the ideological and spiritual dimensions of electrification through parallel narratives set in 1950s Poland. One storyline follows engineers, including a female graduate from the peasantry, scouting routes for the electric grid across the countryside, with cinematography reminiscent of Polish cinema by Krzysztof Zanussi and Andriz Wajda. The other depicts nationalist partisans, known as 'cursed soldiers', hiding in forests and awaiting war. Both groups are subtly animated with flames, a hallmark of Polska's practice. The films eventually fuse into an animated spectacle of electrical power accompanied by a mournful folksong. The installation draws on a 1962 observation by journalist Ryszard Kapuściński about 'electrical communism' and the 'heaven and hell' contained in a switch. It also references Lenin's declaration on electrification as essential to communism, questioning its corrupted realization in Eastern Europe. Viewers sit on benches between two massive projections, creating an interrupted immersive experience. The work addresses local Polish historical tensions and broader climatic anxieties about energy sources like the sun.