The Struggle for Form: Perspectives on Polish Avant-Garde Film 1916-1989 (Columbia University Press, July 2014), co-edited with Michael O’Pray)

Synopsis: This is the first in English comprehensive account of the Polish avant-garde film from its beginnings in the early decades of the last century to the collapse of communism in 1989. This book is an indispensable introduction to the theories and practices of critically important avant-garde artists and filmmakers. Analysing the impact of technological evolution on the newly emerging experimental trends (from 35mm, 16mm to video), this volume appeals to practical and theoretical students interested in experimental filmmaking practices, as well as those concerned with the history of the European avant-gardes in general. The book also contains two of my chapters.

BORO, L'ÎLE D'AMOUR: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk (New York: Berghan Books, 2015), co-edited with Kuba Mikurda and Michal Oleszczyk

Synopsis: There has been a recent revival of interest in the work of Polish film director Walerian Borowczyk, a label-defying auteur and “escape artist” if there ever was one. This collection serves as an introduction and a guide to Borowczyk’s complex and ambiguous body of work, including panoramic views of the director’s output, focused studies of particular movies, and more personal, impressionistic pieces. Taken together, these contributions comprise a wide-ranging survey that is markedly experimental in character, allowing scholars to gain insight into previously unnoticed aspects of Borowczyk’s oeuvre.

Read the Introduction here.

Photomediations: A Reader (Open Humanities Press, 2016), co-edited with Joanna Zylinska

Synopsis: Photomediations: A Reader offers a radically different way of understanding photography. The concept of photomediations that unites the twenty scholarly and curatorial essays collected here cuts across the traditional classification of photography as suspended between art and social practice in order to capture the dynamism of the photographic medium today. It also explores photography’s kinship with other media – and with us, humans, as media. The term ‘photomediations’ brings together the hybrid ontology of ‘photomedia’ and the fluid dynamism of ‘mediation’. The framework of photomediations adopts a process- and time-based approach to images by tracing the technological, biological, cultural, social and political flows of data that produce photographic objects. Photomediations: A Reader is part of a larger editorial and curatorial project called Photomediations: An Open Book, whose goal is to redesign a coffee-table book as an online experience. A version of this Reader also exists online in an open ‘living’ format, which means it can be altered, added to, mashed-up, re-versioned and customized. The Reader is published in collaboration with Europeana Space, and in association with Jonathan Shaw, Ross Varney and Michael Wamposzyc.