Artur Zmijewski: Democracies @ Tramway

This article was first published in The Skinny on 19 January 2011.

Set against a backdrop of nationwide public concern over government funding cuts, and a heightened political engagement within the art world, Artur Zmijewski’s Democracies seems especially pertinent right now. The nineteen short films in the installation depict recent public protests, riots and celebrations that span the political spectrum from the extreme-left to the far-right and range from a demonstration by supporters of anti-abortion laws in Poland, to a weekly protest against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. With student demos in Britain ongoing, however, there is no removed sense of ‘them and us’ about this work.

Mounted on all sides of the room and playing simultaneously (with English subtitles), the films surround the viewer and produce a cacophony of noise that is rousing and affecting. Though viewing the work is a communal activity, the level of sound makes headphones a requirement, allowing one to effectively ignore fellow viewers and to home in on the various ‘democracies’ in action.

Art’s potential to effect political change by making a radical critique of the status quo has become a popular topic of discussion for artists of late. Zmijewski is one who likely considers discussion alone a waste of time, since the central tenet of his work is that art must act, not simply ask questions. Whether you believe that art can or should harbour such ambitions is here irrelevant, however, because the work’s primary ‘political power’ is the emotion it elicits from the unwitting viewer.

In contrast to some other works, where the artist has engineered confrontations between people of radically opposing belief systems, Democracies mines or frames what is already occurring and lets it speak for itself. The encounter staged is one between the work and the audience, and – though we are wise to the guile of editing – this single work wields power through the apparent straightforwardness of its setup. ⎔

Democracies runs 29 October – 12 December 2010.

Image: courtesy Artur Zmijewski

Living Today – group show @ GSA

This article was first published in The Skinny on 26 January 2011.

Sporting a title of almost limitless possibilities, the group show Living Today at the Mackintosh Museum assembles works by contemporary artists who explore aspects of the society they live in, and combines them with material from the Orwell Archive relating to George Orwell’s 1937 publication Wigan Pier.

Glass-topped trestle tables displaying excerpts from Orwell’s manuscripts flank the art works, as though to provide a central point of context. Several artists seem likewise to have borrowed their formal conventions from the museum, so that works of fairly wide-ranging subject matter are each dense in content but not overly engaging on the surface; demands on the attention are high if one is to do them all justice.

Eva Merz’s free publication You, Me, Us and Them (2011) brings together a series of interviews about women in prison and criminal justice in Scotland, and looks a promising read, albeit one to take home for later. If Living Today were in a ‘real’ museum, it would be acceptable to merely dip in and out of the exhibits and enjoy looking at an old coin collection without any further edification. Angela Ferreira’s photographs make a visual comparison of the South African rand and the euro, to hint at the differing stabilities of currency and economic system; in this dense forest of information, however, appreciating their aesthetic value was as far as I got.

A quiet, serious-looking work, Matei Bejenaru’s documentary video nevertheless captures the attention and is worth investing fourteen minutes in. Battling Inertia (2010) follows an ex-worker revisiting the library he set up when he and his co-workers established a literary circle in an industrial plant in communist Romania.

Meanwhile, a series of works by Ross Birrell and David Harding extend the exploration into Orwell and Wigan. If one had been hoping for an Orwell-fest that would feed the imagination, one might be a little disappointed; the amalgam of art works and archive material seem to exist in a mental or narrative space that hasn’t quite translated into the gallery – with the exception of David Harding’s text Orwell and Wigan Today. This brief A4 handout is witty, anecdotal, and the closest the exhibition comes to explaining Wigan and its significance. ⎔

Living Today runs 15 Jan – 5 March 2011 at the Mackintosh Musuem, Glasgow School of Art.

Images: courtesy the Orwell Archive, UCL Special Collections.