About THE WATER HEN: Kantor, Demarco & The Edinburgh Festival Exhibition

Arthur Watson talks about an exhibition centred round the discovery by researchers from the University of Dundee of a hitherto unknown film of Tadeusz Kantor’s seminal production of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz’s ‘The Water Hen’ performed in 1972 under the aegis of Edinburgh gallery director, Richard Demarco. The film was discovered in part of Demarco’s extensive archive held by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. The significance of this find was only realised when a dvd was shown to the Director and staff of Kantor’s archive, Cricoteka, in Krakow (June 2014) when it emerged that the only known film of ‘The Water Hen’ was a twelve minute clip shot in Rome for Italian television. The restored, digitised and subtitled film was premiered at the Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture on July 24th 2015 followed by a five-week public exhibition.