Artur Żmijewski
Antrepo No.3

Born in 1966, Warsaw. Lives in Warsaw.

Artur Żmijewski works as a filmmaker, writer and curator and is an active member of the Political Critique movement in Poland. Żmijewski creates laboratory-type situations to test human behaviour under (extra)ordinary circumstances, which have their model in reality. His work mainly deals with disabilities, historical traumas and taboos as means of accessing collective memory and exploring the construction of normality.
His project Democracies (2009) consists of short pieces of video footage of public political events, filmed in Israel and the West Bank, Poland, Germany, France, Northern Ireland and Austria. The series is a result of the artist's ongoing research into the diversity of political uses of public space. Film clips document a range of events, such as the funeral of the extreme right-wing Austrian politician Jörg Haider in Vienna, anti-NATO demonstrations in Strasbourg, the Way of Cross for Working People in Warsaw, Irish Protestants on a Loyalist march in Belfast, Palestinian demonstrators against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Israeli counter-protests. The artist is interested in rhetoric, visual identity, and the representational language of social discord that follows public political events. He does not take sides, but reveals the highly problematic nature of the democratic process in the public space that shows serious signs (for example, the level of religious penetration into the public sphere) of closing down political potential.