Body Pixel

Today I visited the first project within the framework of 43rd Zagreb Salon’s ‘Anti-Design / Permanent Alternatives’ exhibition, that deals with social responsibility of the author – curated by Silva Kalcic.

Exhibition by Zbigniew Libera ‘Correct Me if I’m Wrong’ in the ULUPUH gallery presents his classic works: LEGO Concentration Camp, Positives, 2002-2003 and video ‘How to train the girls‘.

Zbigniew Libera (c) taken from VVork

Pole Zbigniew Libera is an intriguing personality of contemporary art for the last 30 years. He’s moving the boundaries of our perception, and always managing to be in advance right before the finishing line. Libera expresses himself in the fields of photography, video, installation and object art, drawings…

Zbigniew Libera (c)

He’s considered to be one of the forerunners of ‘body art’ with his quite disturbing videos “Intimate Rites” and “Mystical Perseverance” made in 80’s, about 10 years before the expansion of body art in the world.

LEGO Concentration Camp is very famous artwork where artist was immersed into historic fact that concentration camps where not invented by Nazis but by the British during the Second Boer War in Africa (around 1900). At the other hand the symbol of all concentration camps in the world became Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.

Zbigniew Libera (c)

This was rather interesting paradigm for him to start a project jointly with the LEGO Company, designing several series of toys and their accessories to present concentration camps in pop culture environment, but not losing any of its authenticity. In the middle of the promotion the company decided to sue the artist coz they were not quite satisfied with customers’ reactions to the project, but the pressure of the press was so strong, that they decided to drop the case. The rest is history…

Zbigniew Libera (c)

It’s worth to mention that Libera refuses to be a part of art establishment, he spent one year in prison for sharing underground newspapers in communist Poland; he also refused to participate in the Polish Pavillion at the Venice Biennial in nineties.

Libera’s photography project Positives is a sort of contemporary makeover, where the artist restaged famous historic images in different context, following the same patterns and composition with new ‘actors’ within new semantic system.

Zbigniew Libera (c)

‘The series is another attempt at playing with trauma. We are always dealing with memorized objects, not the objects themselves. I wanted to employ this mechanism of seeing and remembering and touch upon the phenomenon of memory’s afterimages. This is how we actually perceive those photographs ["Positives"] – the harmless scenes trigger flashbacks of the brutal originals. I have picked the “negatives” from my own memory, from among the images I remembered from the childhood.’

Coz this is a body related blog, I can’t resist not mentioning here his installation Body Master created inside the cycle ‘Correcting Devices’. Body Master is consisted of two mini body building devices and an advertising poster adapted for kids between 7-9 years old. It’s a body building kit for kids, but instead of real weights those are made of cardboard to train kids psyche.

Zbigniew Libera (c)

Zbigniew Libera is not afraid of ‘deep water’, and his introspection of consumer society and predominated behaviour could be described as playful sharp criticism.