Image: Artur Zmijewski Repetition 2005Two new shows at the IMA
23 August — 11 October
Artur Zmijewski
Artur Zmijewski
Artur Zmijewski’s unabashedly political artworks are among the most cogent and courageous meditations on the psychical complexities of fascism and state violence currently being produced. Combining performance and video, the Warsaw-based artist utilises bodily dysfunction and abjection as allegories for despotism. His protagonists are the sick, the mentally ill, the handicapped and the imprisoned.
– Derek Conrad Murray.
Polish artist Artur Zmijewski is renowned for his confronting documentary videos. He observes people, often in scenarios he has himself set up.
Zmijewski deals with themes of power and powerlessness in relation to the body. People play tag in the nude in a former concentration camp gas-chamber. An Auschwitz survivor recounts his experience of imprisonment, while having his tattooed camp serial-number ‘refreshed’. A Zionist extremist delivers a righteous video-epistle: ‘For every Jew dead we will kill not 3000 but 300,000’. Polish soldiers perform their drill, chanting songs about war and women, first outside in their uniforms and then, laughably, naked, in a ballet rehearsal room.
Many of Zmijewski’s works focus on marginals, particularly the ill and disabled. He observes the everyday struggles of people suffering from Huntington’s Disease. He organises singing lessons for the deaf. There is often ambiguity. In An Eye For An Eye (1998), the able-bodied co-operate with amputees, filling in for their missing limbs, momentarily completing them. It is hard to tell if they are kindly caregivers or if they have been appropriated and elided by those with greater needs.
The centrepieces of the show are two major works Repetition (made as Poland’s contribution to the 2005 Venice Biennale) and Them (made for last year’s Documenta). In Repetition Zmijewski repeats the famous 1971 American psychology experiment where participants were paid to play prisoners and guards. In the original experiment, the jailers rapidly became sadistic and the experiment had to be curtailed. However, the result of Zmijewski’s experiment was somewhat different. While his jailers descended into barbarism, they had a change of heart, experiencing solidarity with their captives, and together all walked out on the experiment.
Them reads like a parody of an art school crit-session. It documents a series of art workshops Zmijewski held with members of four Polish extremist groups. First he met with them separately, and had them paint their insignia, the symbols of their beliefs. Then he brought them together to correct one another’s paintings. Conflict erupted as Catholics and neo-nationalists united against the left-wingers and Jewish youths. They started painting over, cutting and burning the others’ symbols, clashing over the body politics of the Polish nation. Despite their radical differences, those on the far right and those on the far left behaved similarly, speaking on behalf of the social whole while ignoring the other.
Zmijewski’s videos are at once uncannily like – and unlike – reality television. They catch people at their most naked and vulnerable. Sometimes hysterical, sometimes excruciating to watch, they are a profound exploration of our situation and the double binds it entails. A joint project with Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Pakuranga, Auckland. Artur Zmijewski is represented by Peter Kilchmann Gallery, Zurich.
WARNING: This exhibition is not suitable for children. Some people may find some films disturbing or offensive. Some films involve nudity.
Ai Weiwei - Fairytale
For his contribution to last year’s Documenta, the big survey of world art that occurs every five years in the small German town of Kassel, prominent Chinese artist Ai Weiwei flew 1001 of his countrymen over to see the show. The volunteers, selected by Ai Weiwei, mostly from an open call on his blog, came for a week 200 at a time, with airfares and lodging covered. The artist chose 'those who are not able to travel overseas under normal conditions, or those to whom traveling overseas has a very important meaning'. While international travel is typically available only to upper-class Chinese, Ai Weiwei's group included farmers, laid-off workers, street vendors, teachers, students, rock singers, artists and engineers. Identifiable through
their 'tourist uniform', designed by the artist, participants lived communally in an abandoned factory and were free to roam around Kassel but could not leave the city. Dubbed Fairytale – Kassel was home to the Brothers Grimm from 1798 to 1830 – the work offered a doubling. The exotic Chinese visitors were at once art objects and viewers; but through an awareness of their gaze, the German locals could also imagine themselves as exotic, as objects for their visitors' touristic regard. The artist documented the project in a three-hour film.
their 'tourist uniform', designed by the artist, participants lived communally in an abandoned factory and were free to roam around Kassel but could not leave the city. Dubbed Fairytale – Kassel was home to the Brothers Grimm from 1798 to 1830 – the work offered a doubling. The exotic Chinese visitors were at once art objects and viewers; but through an awareness of their gaze, the German locals could also imagine themselves as exotic, as objects for their visitors' touristic regard. The artist documented the project in a three-hour film.
The Institute of Modern Art acknowledges Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, through whose initiative Ai Weiwei’s film Fairytale was first exhibited in Australia.
