In Teresa Tyszkiewicz’s film recordings made from the late 1970s, the primary means of expression was the artist’s body. Drawing from her own, often intimate, experience and embracing a repertoire of erotic and fetishistic references, Tyszkiewicz demonstrates an image of emancipated female sexuality. Her films challenged the cultural models of People’s Poland and the male-dominated artistic establishment and underground of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The film Day After Day (1980) recorded in the artist’s flat takes the form of an expressive vision of everyday life perceived through emotions and unconscious desires. The experience of the everyday environment in repetitive and inexplicable activities takes on obsessive dimensions.
Using different objects and matter she staged situations, in which sensuality bordered on masochistic practices. In the film Grain (1980) referring to archetypal meanings she exposed the physical limits of bodily experiences. she emphasized the sensuality of physical contact with the materials like grain, soil, bulbous vegetables or feathers.
In Breath (1981), during improvised for camera activities involving various objects and materials, she played with sexual and erotic stereotypes, staging situations that visualised personal emotions and unconscious desires. The sensuality of the film images showing the bodily experience of the world appeals to sensory perception.
The film Image and Games (1981) shows the characteristics of all her art, its processuality, corporeality, and its organic nature. The subsequent frames show the artist’s spontaneous expression, her emotional and intuitive approach based on psychophysical experience
In Adaptation, performance recorded in 1981 at the Künstlerhaus in Stuttgart, she presented a kind of intuitive ritual informed by archetypal meanings and impossible to rationalise subjective experience.
In the film Arta, dedicated to a newborn daughter, the artist reveals the physiological dimension of experiences related to childbirth and motherhood. The film is an example of her radically subjective imagination, and ecstatic art realised in the union of the body with the substantial realness of nature.
Her first films were made in collaboration with Zdzisław Sosnowski. Permanent Position (1979) and The Other Side (1980) show a sensual story of the intimate relation of a couple in love. In Permanent Position subsequent frames full of erotic tension develop the game between the authors of the film, who are married in their private life. The net of tensions between a men and women played by the artists is emphasized by the way the film is assembled, by the combination of moving and photographic images. In The Other Side the scenes of intimate rituals merge with the media culture that enters the Polish reality at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s via television and the press.
