Artur Żmijewski
RCPA
The work premiered at the collective exhibition Scene 2000 at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in 2000. The artist invited former conscripts, soldiers of the Representative Company of the Polish Army, to participate in the project. In the first part of the film, dressed in borrowed uniforms and with mock weapons, they perform a representative drill to the sounds of martial songs, marching in parade formation by the Berling Army monument. In the second part, the same men appear in a ballet hall filled with mirrors. Undressed, initially only in boots and four-cornered caps, and later completely naked, but still with rifles, they perform the same exercises as in the open air. Their bodies, stripped of military costume and context, become free and delicate again. The men pick up on the atmosphere of joyful fun in the hall, exposing their nudity, which reveals their weakness and fragility, completely contrary to the stereotype of masculinity.
Artur Żmijewski
(b. 1966) a visual artist, the author of films, objects, installations and photographs, a curator and author of publications in the field of contemporary
art. He studied at the Faculty of Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, graduating in the class of Prof. Grzegorz Kowalski in 1995. One of the prominent representatives of the critical art movement in Poland, he was associated for many years with the periodical Krytyka Polityczna. In 2005, Żmijewski represented Poland at the 51st International Art Biennale in Venice, where he showed the film Repetition; in 2012, he was the curator of the 7th Biennale of Contemporary Art in Berlin.