March 23, 2012: The Effects of Art

On March 23 Igor Stokfiszewski (literary critic, editor and  playwright, member of the 7. Berlin Biennale team) and Salvatore Lacagnina (Head of Arts Programming at  the ISR), will discuss the forms of responsibility and possible intervention of art in the social and political realities, through the work of Artur Żmijewski.

Artur Żmijewski (Warsaw, 1966) started working as an artist in the 90s, when he studied in the sculpture class of Professor Grzegorz Kowalski at the Warsaw Art Accademy with Katarzyna Kozyra and Pawel Althamer. During those years he mainly worked with photography and film: he approached the themes of repression and social traumas and provoked a social debate through his artistic expression. His work became  known for An Eye for an Eye (1998-2000): here Żmijewski worked with a group of physically disabled people.
In 2005 he represented Poland at the 51 st Venice Biennale with the film Repetition (2005). In 2007 he  published a series of interviews with artists entitled “Drżące ciała” (Trembling Bodies).
He collaborates regularly with the Foksal Gallery Foundation and is Art Director of the left-wing socialpolitical journal Krytyka Polityczna. This collaboration with KP has given him the opportunity to theorize on his artistic position through articles such as “Stosowane Sztuki Społeczne” (The Applied Social Arts). Published for the first time in the journal in 2007, “The Applied Social Arts” provoked a growing debate about the question of the necessity of contemporary art to have a substantial impact on society. In his manifesto, Żmijewski analyzes several particular situations in which he defines “art as political as long as it stays away from politics – it can act politically in galleries but not in real-life debates unfolding in a different communal space, such as the media.” Artur Żmijewski lives and works in Berlin and Warsaw.

Igor Stokfiszewski (1979) is a literary critic, editor and playwright. He collaborates regularly with Krytyka Polityczna and is member of the 7. Berlin Biennale team. He studied Polish philology at the University of Lodz and at Jagiellonian University. He was editor of the literary magazine Ha! art from 2001 until 2006 and is author of the volume Political Turn (2009). He has worked as a playwright since 2005 and more recently has contributed to Mass, the reconstruction of the rite of a Roman Catholic mass, directed by Artur Żmijewski that was performed on two consecutive evenings at the Teatr Dramatyczny in Warsaw in October 2011. He is co-editor of the Berlin Biennale blog: www.berlinbiennale.de/blog/