June 29, 2004
Artur Zmijewski at MIT List Visual Arts Center
Here's an Artforum.com review of Artur Zmijewski's first US exhibition, recently held at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. The review is already in the Artforum online archives, so here's the full text:
The stateside debut of Polish video artist and filmmaker Artur Zmijewski covers the last five years of his practice and stars casts of characters uncommon in contemporary art: the physically handicapped, the aged and infirm, nude soldiers, deaf children. Earlier works stage interactions between multiple people on-screen. In the video An Eye for an Eye, 1998, people missing body parts are paired with healthy partners who effectively "lend" the use of their bodies to complete rudimentary tasks. Out for a Walk, 2000, follows able-bodied men "walking" the bodies of completely paralyzed individuals. None of this is exploitative, as Zmijewski's impassive, respectful lens—each video involves only rudimentary camera work and offers no authorial commentary—triggers an instinctive sympathy in the gallerygoer. More recent works like Our Songbook, 2003, further reduce the distance between subject and viewer. In the video, a group of aged Polish émigrés to Israel, after years of speaking Hebrew almost exclusively, attempt to remember and sing the lyrics to the Polish national anthem. Zmijewski's emphasis on vulnerable bodies and faltering minds is a sharp reminder of the precariousness of the privilege of health.