Zbigniew Libera
The Bather
The title of Zbigniew Libera’s video installation comes from the jargon of funeral home workers, who affectionately refer to a dead body being washed before burial as a “bather.” A television picture tube, connected to a spiral structure made of transparent acrylic glass plates fastened by metal strips, displays an image of a drain into which water is pouring. As Ryszard W. Kluszczyński notes, the work’s austere technological appearance and the theme of transience it raises “clashes the coldness of electronic technology with the fever of mortal matter.”
Zbigniew Libera
(b. 1959) an author of objects, installations, videos, photographs and performances. In the 1980s, he was an active member of the Łódź scene, where he was associated with the independent art movement, including the collectives Strych and Kultura Zrzuty. At the same time, he co-founded the music groups NAO and Sternenhoch, as well as the magazine Tango. He is considered a precursor and one of the leading representatives of the critical art movement. His works offer penetrating and subversive comments on the
traditional model of upbringing, the cultural perception of corporeality and the codes of mass culture, raising issues about the manipulation of reality by the media.