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Brainrot Video Display is a presentation of ten video works from the publication Hidden Decade: Polish Video Art 1985-1995. The ‘brainrot’ of the title – a term derived from contemporary internet culture, describing mental fatigue, overload and chaos – becomes here the starting point for a reflection on Polish video art of the 1980s and 1990s. Video as a medium at the end of the 20th century functioned at the junction of experimentation, technological scarcity and political breakthrough, presenting a subjective, disturbing image of reality.

The term ‘brainrot’ refers to the deconstruction of the image and the perceptual tension that was present in the works of artists of this period. Video art created on the margins of the official narrative was, on the one hand, an act of rebellion and, on the other, a record of the decay and redefinition of the world in the age of transformation. Video between 1985 and 1995 carried with it an aesthetic of instability, a search for identity and a strained medium, which fits in with ideas of ‘rot’ – the slow deterioration of image and sound, and thinking of art as a form of struggle with culture and social change.

The works presented at Brainrot Video Display show the diversity of the artistic language of that decade: from formal experiments with video tape to critical, often subversive commentaries on reality. Polish video art, like contemporary phenomena of digital culture, evokes the feeling of information overload, an excess of stimuli and the erosion of narrative – phenomena that we today refer to as ‘brainrot’.

The exhibition is an attempt to re-read that decade through the prism of contemporary categories – it reveals how video artists were ahead of their time, diagnosing problems that are particularly relevant today.