Artur Zmijewski Videos: The Game of Tag

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.