zblog

Artur Zmijewski’s “The Game of Tag”, included in the current show ‘Under Pain of Death’ at the Austrian Cultural Forum and discovered in NYT’S review by Ken Johnson, shows a group of naked people playing tag in the gas chamber of a former Nazi death camp. On Zmijewski’s video works, Frieze says: “…they are also some of the most penetrating meditations currently being produced on state violence, physical pain, individual alienation, the defective and the dysfunctional.” Zmijewski’s “Repetition”, included in the Polish Pavillion of the 51st Venice Biennale, is a documentary recording of the re-enactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment, a famous 1971 psychological experiment studying human behaviour in prison conditions, conducted by professor Philip Zimbardo at the US Stanford University.
e-flux further informs:

…his film trips into the past, confronts dysfunctions of human body, historical traumas, the disintegration of the will and memory. The artist often plays the role of a “laboratory scientist, arranging quasi-therapeutic situations…Dramatic events from the past return in Zmijewskis films deformed, processed by the imperfect memory, rendered unreal. His works are often comments on the processes of victimisation, stigmatisation, exclusion subjects studied by social psychology. Reaching for the Zimbardo experiment is a natural consequence of the artists interests.

on z side…Zmijewski is a participant in the TRANSMEDIALE.08 Festival: