Kronika in Bytom and DAAD Berliner Kuenstlerprogramm proudly announce Trembling Bodies, Conversations with Artists by Artur Żmijewski (English and German version). Trembling bodies is an anthology of Artur Żmijewski’s conversations with Polish artists related to the “critical art” movement, such as Paweł Althamer, Jacek Adamas, Katarzyna Górna, Andrzej Karaś, Grzegorz Klaman, Grzegorz Kowalski, Katarzyna Kozyra, Zbigniew Libera, Jacek Markiewicz, Joanna Rajkowska, Monika Zielińska.
These conversations, conducted between 1993 and 2004, express radical artistic positions analyzed through the lens of everyday-life, and social and political transformations. This corpus of texts appears as a major document relating the evolutions of Polish art from the 1990s to the present. Żmijewski is not a neutral interlocutor: he expects and provokes proofs and explanations, like an investigator. He is seeking the very explosive material that enabled “critical art” - the only cultural movement in post-communist Poland - to openly confront our own social imaginations. Żmijewski’s book appears as a friendly farewell to “critical art”, and as a will to formulate a new program of artistic actions, described by the author in his manifesto Applied Social Arts.
Trembling bodies contains also texts by Ariane Beyn, Stanisław Ruksza and conversation by Sebastian Cichocki with Artur Żmijewski.
Artur Żmijewski (b. 1966) is a video artist, sculptor and curator. He collaborates with Fundacja Galeria Foksal and is the Art Editor of the Polish journal Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critic). He graduated in 1995 from the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he studied in Grzegorz Kowalski’s „Kowalnia”, a famous workshop that encouraged several generations of art students to produce transgressive and experimental works. His film The Repetition represented Poland during the 51st Venice Biennale. His works have been presented at Documenta 12 in Kassel, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, or KunstWerke in Berlin. He is the winner of the Ordway Prize 2010, awarded by Creative Link and the New Museum in New York for exceptional contributions to visual arts. He has recently been appointed curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale in 2012.
Soon: events connected with Trembling bodies (film shows, lectures, discussions, meetings with artists) all over the world
The world premiere in DAAD Galerie in Berlin - on the 10th February 2011
Cover picture: Andrzej Karaś, from the series Karaski in Beef, ca. 1992. Photograph: Katarzyna Kozyra, courtesy of artists
design: fontarte
