Artur Zmijewski Videos: Berek

Many of Żmijewski s video works deal with the traumatic stigma of the past, the extermination of Jews in World War II and the difficult Polish-Jewish relations. In Berek / The Game of Tag, 1999 (illustrations) (1999), he filmed a group of naked men and women of different ages playing tag. Only at the end does it become clear that these people have been recorded at two different locations, one of them neutral, the other stigmatized with the tragic past as it is a gas chamber of what was once a Nazi concentration camp. Żmijewski compared this experience to a therapeutic situation. Instead of a tragedy, we see here an innocent child s game. This is reminiscent of a clinical situation in psychotherapy. What I was interested in was the paradox of the religious motivation to go and experience the spiritual return to the roots of one s faith when in fact the holiest places of the catholic faith are located in the Jewish land. This presents a fundamental conflict, inasmuch as those pilgrims have never accepted the existence of Israel.Repetition is also present in 80064 (illustrations) (2004), another film by Żmijewski. The title is the number given to Józef Tarnawa in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Żmijewski manages to persuade Tarnawa to retouch his old number. At first skeptical, Tarnawa eventually succumbs to persuasion and agrees. In this work Żmijewski tried to highlight the role of conformism, both in the context of concentration camps, as well as now, in the process of retatooing the number. The artist has been quoted as saying, this film repeats the very same act of conformism, consent, and subordination.