About the Film

The Aquarium grew out of a collaboration between filmmaker Paweł Wojtasik and writer Ginger Strand, who met while in residence at MacDowell. Inspired by Strand’s essay “Why Look at Fish?,” Wojtasik conceived and created the film’s visual form and structure, while Strand contributed the text heard in voice-over—an accumulation of species names, environmental statistics, pollutants, illnesses, and other factual material.

Filmed at Resurrection Bay and the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward, as well as at aquariums in Mystic, Connecticut, and New York, The Aquarium examines the uneasy relationship between the public display of marine life and the environmental destruction taking place beyond the aquarium walls.

The film moves between expansive views of the Alaskan landscape and intimate images of beluga whales, sea lions, walruses, and other marine creatures held behind glass. A voice recites accumulations of factual material: the growth of the aquarium industry, the destruction of coral reefs, pollutants found in marine environments, threats to beluga whales, and the lingering consequences of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Rather than presenting this information as a conventional environmental argument, the film allows the voice to move in and out of an ambient soundtrack while its images approach abstraction. Beauty, captivity, spectacle, vulnerability, and violence remain suspended together. The aquarium becomes both a place of fascination and an enclosure that can obscure the destruction of the environments it claims to represent.

The final image—a bright orange octopus clinging tightly to the latex-gloved hand attempting to remove it from the water—leaves the relationship between human and animal unresolved: intimate, coercive, and resistant.

Distribution

The Aquarium is distributed by Video Data Bank.

View the film at Video Data Bank

View Paweł Wojtasik Videoworks: Volume 1

That compilation includes The Aquarium along with three other works

Writing on the Film

Claire Barliant, “Paweł Wojtasik,” Artforum, May 2006

Barliant considers the film’s treatment of captivity, environmental destruction, and the domestication of marine life. She emphasizes its movement between factual information and abstraction, and the deliberate ambivalence with which it joins beauty, spectacle, confinement, and resistance.

Read the Artforum review

Benjamin Genocchio, “The Mind’s Eye (It’s All a Blur),” The New York Times, March 19, 2006

Reviewing the exhibition Hypervision at the Westport Arts Center, Genocchio praises The Aquarium for its striking images of Alaska and its poignant scenes of animals in captivity. He writes that the film “obliges us to think seriously about the act of looking at animals in captivity,” while also noting that the work was poorly served by the exhibition’s daylight and inadequate sound conditions.

Read the archived review (PDF)

Interview

Scott MacDonald, “Perception as Transcendence: Interview with Paweł Wojtasik”
Film Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 2, Winter 2011, pp. 52–58

A wide-ranging conversation about perception, fear, Buddhist practice, and the development of Wojtasik’s cinema. The interview discusses The Aquarium as a collaboration with Ginger Strand and as the beginning of a more socially and ecologically oriented strand in the artist’s work.

Read the interview in Film Quarterly

Acknowledgment

The Aquarium was first presented in a solo exhibition at Alona Kagan Gallery in New York in 2006—my first one-person exhibition in the city. I completed the work only an hour before the opening. Alona Kagan, who had placed her trust in the project, simply said, “I knew you would come through.” I remain deeply grateful for her confidence and support at a decisive moment in my work.

Selected Screenings and Exhibitions

Prismatic Ground Film Festival, 2021
Hamilton College, 2011
International House, Philadelphia, 2011
Anthology Film Archives, 2009
Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, 2009
Scanners Video Festival, Lincoln Center, 2007
PBS / WNET Thirteen, 2007
Images Festival, 2007
Anthology Film Archives, 2006
Maui Film Festival, 2006
Alona Kagan Gallery, 2006 — solo exhibition