Trembling Bodies / Körper in Aufruhr
book launch & exhibition
11 February–12 March 2011
Zimmerstr. 90/ 91
10117 Berlin
Mon–Sat 11am-6pm
www.daadgalerie.de
The conversations Żmijewski initiated between 1993 and the present with artists associated with the Polish movement “Critical Art”—which radicalized and modernized the language of art as well as its mediums and ways of distribution—serve as one of the most important documents of this tendency of art and of the historical change in Poland after 1989. The protagonists of this book took part in a confrontation which enfolded across the most various parts of life that changed the political reality and defined a political language in which ideas and concepts took on radically new meanings. In Trembling Bodies the interviewees speak to their artist colleague Żmijewski in an uninhibited way about their work, their artistic biographies, their education and influences as well as the social upheavals in Poland in the 1990s until today. Żmijewski’s conversation partners share the experiences of a generation as well as special methods of working: the readiness to sacrifice themselves, freedom of choice, and an unwillingness to compromise.
The exhibition gathers together a selection of films and performance documentation that have been up until now never or only rarely seen in Germany. Often starting off from the image and experience of the human body, the artists whose practice is referred to as critical tackle existential questions of humanity under the new and yet-undefined capitalist conditions as themes of their art: individuality and the social, corporality, e.g. the body as the site of experiments and the exposure of the body’s involvement in power structures, sexuality and homosexuality, age, sickness and the handicapped, and forms of Otherness in general as well as borderline experiences and death. Although social norms of all kinds are tested and reflected upon, these artists employ for their critical account of reality for the most part neither direct speech nor documentary methods, but rather use the language of theatrical mise-en-scene, social experiments, unthinkable associations, or the power of images, with attention given to socially disregarded or regarded areas, which they explore thoroughly.
With: Paweł Althamer, Katarzyna Kozyra, Grzegorz Klaman, Zbigniew Libera, Jacek Markiewicz, Joanna Rajkowska, Monika Mamzeta (Zielińska) and Artur Żmijewski.
In collaboration with Artur Żmijewski and Stanisław Ruksza, CCA Kronika, Bytom.
Paweł Althamer (2001), Katarzyna Kozyra (2003), and Artur Żmijewski (2007/08) were guests of the Berliner Künstlerprogramms/ DAAD.
Trembling Bodies / Körper in Aufruhr, 2011, Published by the Berliner Künstlerprogramm/ DAAD and CSW Kronika, Bytom. www.berliner-kuenstlerprogramm.de, www.kronika.org.pl
Trembling Bodies (ISBN 978-83-61853-08-4), Körper in Aufruhr (ISBN 978-83-61853-12-1)
Press contact:
artpress – Ute Weingarten
Tel: +49 (0)30 2196 1843
artpress@uteweingarten.de
www.artpress-uteweingarten.de
Image above:
Book cover: Trembling Bodies.
Cover image: (C) Andrzej Karaś, Karaski in Beef, 1992.
Photo: Katarzyna Kozyra.
Courtesy: the artists.
