Radical Solidarity

Artur Zmijewski is a Polish artist of international renown. All but indifferent, his works deal with the exposure and vulnerability of human life while questioning the society’s image of normality and the legitimacy of an attitude that renounces otherness in the name of tolerance.

His works give rise to unusual and sometimes apparently ruthless situations, which provocatively dodge the self-defence systems we use to keep off our fears from incomprehensible phenomena.

Singing Lesson 2 shows deaf-and-dumb children singing a Bach cantata at a church in Leipzig. The figures of The Game of Tag frantically chase one another around in a former gas chamber, naked, as if for therapeutic reasons; 80064 is a prisoner number, re-tattooed on the forearm of an elderly holocaust survivor in the film.

The presentation of the handicapped, the elderly, the trauma-stricken or the practitioners of power in a way that is at once disturbing, provocative and playful, puts the recipient into a disenchantingly uncomfortable (uncanny) position, which makes him/her recognise the humiliating nature of pity accompanied by feelings of powerlessness and fury.

What reactions do these hideously intimate close-ups provoke? Pity? Powerlessness? Fury? The presentation of the handicapped, the elderly, the trauma-stricken or the practitioners of power in a way that is at once disturbing, provocative and playful, puts the recipient into a disenchantingly uncomfortable position.