Artists reinvent iconic posters as GIFs

Print is dead, or so the cliche goes, but the poster lives on at the 25th Warsaw International Poster biennale, the world’s largest and most prestigious event dedicated to the art. This year, to mark the festival’s fiftieth anniversary, artists and graphic design studios from all over the world were invited to turn a selection of iconic posters into a GIF or an animated short.

Artists Mateusz Kokot and Tomasz Sroka shared the competition’s main prize, it was announced on Thursday. Kokot animated Marion Diethelm’s Text, Buchstabe, Bild (1970), while Sroka reinterpreted Alain Le Quernec’s Attention: Au Début Hitler Faisait Rire (1987).

The winning works will take part in the multimedia exhibition The Poster Remediated in June, curated by David Crowley. From artistic animations to smartphone apps, the exhibition is an opportunity to learn how the poster has adapted to different contexts.

“There is much discussion today about the death of the poster, but in fact, this concern isn’t new. It goes back to the late 1960s and the spread of electronic communication. Now, it’s the internet that’s identified as the poster’s nemesis. In reality, we still fill our streets with advertising billboards, and when protesters march against injustice they carry posters. New media communications have lots of posterlike qualities: an internet meme — an image captioned with a slogan — is a digital poster, even if it wasn’t created by a poster designer,” says the exhibition’s curator.

The Poster Remediated will be on show at The Poster Museum in Warsaw from 11 June until 25 September 2016.