Anja Kirschner : POLLY II: Plan for a Revolution in Docklands

“ The mans just admitted it! The flood was engineered as a direct response to ‘unforeseen fluctuations’ – now, he wouldn’t mean their very predictable desire to cleanse the areas adjacent to the city meant callously flushing us out of our homes and neighbourhoods, would he, eh?” Agitator at a Public Consultation Meeting, Year 20XX

Set in the not-so-distant future POLLY II – part satirical sci-fi, part soap opera and Brechtian ‘Lehrstueck’ – portrays the lives of pirates and outcasts surviving in the flooded ruins of East London, a lawless zone set to become the latest in luxury waterside living according to government plans and venturing developers’ wet dreams.

The film imagines a future insurrection coloured by the legacy of dispossessed peasants, political radicals, whores, sailors, pirates, and former slaves whom once inhabited East London and fought a daily battle against their subjection to poverty, displacement and judicial terror.

Alluding to Polly (1728) – John Gay’s censored sequel to the popular Beggars Opera (1727), which resurrected the character of the robber, MacHeath in the disguise of the African pirate captain Morano (scheming to take revenge on a colony in the West Indies) – POLLY II is populated by many of the characters made popular by Gay and Brecht. The film features the naïve and incorruptible Polly, the vengeful whore Jenny Diver, and the treacherous and greedy Peachum – fencer, thief catcher and king of the beggars.

Anja Kirschner will be at Transmission Gallery for a special screening of POLLY II followed a Q & A session with Richard Birkett on Saturday 26 May at 3pm. Richard Birkett is an artist and writer based in London. He is co-director of Whitechapel Project Space, and a regular contributor to Untitled magazine. He is involved in several curatorial projects including forthcoming event La Commune at the Serpentine Gallery, and Asia Europe Mediations opening in July in Poznan, Poland. This event is free. All Welcome

Anja Kirschner is an artist filmmaker based in London who studied at Slade School of Fine Art, London, and also at The School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She was the winner of the Becks Futures Student Film and Video Prize in 2002, and has exhibited internationally in film festivals and galleries.

Transmission Gallery would like to thank Whitechapel Project Space

Anja Kirschner
POLLY II: Plan for a Revolution in Docklands