Artur Żmijewski’s Democracies opens at the DAAD galerie in Berlin on 28 March. A couple of years back, Żmijewski sat on a panel at CCA with Dr. Phil Zimbardo, the social psychologist who conducted the infamous Standford Prison Experiment in 1971. Employing a group of unemployed Poles who collectively elected to walk out of the ad hoc prison after several days’ time, Żmijewski organized a re-make of the study, Repetition, in 2005. His interest in exposing social conflict is in keeping with Polish Absurdist theatrical traditions — see: Kantor — though I find Repetition too simplistic in its mimetic approach.
Unlike Repetition, Democracies, is not posited as a staged social experiment. Instead, Żmijewski explores a “found” public realm in a series of shorter documentary films that employ existing documentary footage of events such as demonstrations or parades. Given my interest in that legacy of Eastern European performance, I’ll suspend my disbelief and await the opportunity to view this new project.
Image: Democracies (Warsaw), 2009, Videostill
