Artur Żmijewski
Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw, Poland
Artur Żmijewski, Democracies (2009). Weekly protest against Israeli occupation, 30.05.2008, Bil’in, West Bank
Polish artist Artur Żmijewski has had a good 12 months: the subject of monographs in several high-profile art magazines, he recently won a commission that is due to open at MoMA in September. For much of this time, the artist himself was on the road, filming mass public actions from Belfast to Gaza, thanks to the funding provided by the German government’s DAAD cultural exchange programme.
The result is ‘Democracies’ (2009), a series of originally 16, then 20, and eventually 23 short documentary films (the numbers keep growing as Żmijewski finds new events), focused on the political use of social space, which is currently showing at both the DAAD Galerie in Berlin and the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw. There is footage from controversial Austrian politician Jörg Haider’s funeral in Vienna, an anti-NATO rally in Strasbourg, separate protests against the Gaza War in both Israel and Palestine, and military reenactments in Warsaw, recently brought into the calendar by conservative Polish politicians the Kaczyński twins to mark Poland’s glorious 1920 ‘Miracle at the Vistula’ victory over the Soviet Union.
Demonstration of the ‘Solidarity’ Trades Union, 29.08.2008, Warsaw, Poland
Żmijewski’s gaze is anthropological, distanced and occasionally passive-aggressive. In Belfast, a girl at a unionist festival speaks into the camera to tell the artist to ‘fuck off back to Poland.’ Żmijewski says nothing, but follows her down the street, the girl turning around and repeating her message, becoming more confused each time. ‘Do you not understand? Fuck off back to where you came from.’ The discussion ends after Żmijewski’s camera catches sight of a young boy standing in the middle of the street, listlessly hitting a drum, one beat at a time.
A church in Vienna, a church in Warsaw, protesters in Palestine, pilgrims in Poland… The west comes to seem riven by ritual actions all pulling in different directions. At a demonstration of Palestinian mothers in Israel, one says, in English, ‘Three hundred children killed – why?’; at a military parade in Poland, a column of gleaming new tanks.
The feast of the Polish Army and a military parade, 15.08.2008, Warszawa
In Berlin, the films are being shown simultaneously, on a series of plasma screen monitors. In Warsaw, the footage is being projected in sequence onto a screen stretched in front of a window, the Palace of Culture visible in the background. The image framed a dichotomy which recurs through these all films: turbulence and stasis, royal order and pagan energy. Anarchist demonstrators beat drums and dance as they blockade a highway in Israel, and seem to panic the soldiers charged with dispersing them. In Vienna, as Haider is buried, the pageantry is filed and ordered.
Żmijewski is an active member of the Polish political movement Krytyka Polityczna, and the artistic director of their self-titled magazine. His new work appears more realist and more directly political than some of his work from the past, yet in other ways might be read as less engaged. In ‘Democracies’, Żmijewski no longer appears interested in constructing situations, as he was in his confrontation-staging video Them (2007), but instead simply in recording them. Time will tell whether this is a permanent change of direction, or a tactical detour.
Daniel Miller
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