Liverpool Biennial and FACT are delighted to present Sharon Lockhart’s new study footage, shown on the occasion of her solo exhibition as part of Liverpool Biennial 2014.

This work-in-progress footage is an extension of Lockhart’s relationship with a young Polish woman named Milena, as well as her research on the influential Polish-Jewish pedagogue Janusz Korczak, whose seminal essay ‘Rights of the Child’ celebrates the often-disregarded voice of the child. Lockhart first befriended Milena in 2009 during the filming of Pòdworka in Lodz, Poland. At the time a nine-year-old girl, Milena inserted herself into the film’s making as a sort of impromptu assistant director, helping with casting and choreographing. Now fifteen years old, Milena is currently living in a girl’s home outside Warsaw named the ‘Youth Centre for Sociotherapy Rudzienko’.

This study footage grew out of a series of educational workshops, for Milena and 15 of her peers, that Lockhart organised at a farmhouse near to the home. The workshops were led by educator Bartek Przybył Ołowski, co-author of the Polish schoolbook Philosophical Education and Critical thinking. Together, the young women, Lockhart’s educators, and the film crew worked with this philosophical text, developing exercises and activities designed to empower their own voices, and emphasising the specific ways in which each participant chose to articulate their own perspectives about the world.

Working in a group to create a script for the film, and to choreograph a set of scenes in which the young women’s conversations interact with the surrounding landscape to address topics of children’s agency and selfhood. Notions of freedom, place, judgment and choice are often subject matter in these conversations, whose backdrop is at the same time idyllic and dilapidated. Lockhart’s non-narrative style allows viewers to meditate on the relationship of text to image, the girls’ body language, and to consider each voice that emerges: honouring Korzack and the child’s voice that he so valued.

Rudzienko (working title) is commissioned by Liverpool Biennial and FACT, 2014. Co-produced by the Kadist Art Foundation with additional support from neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.