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Artur Zmijewski (Warsaw)
KR WP (2000/2001)
DVD, Polish with English subtitles, 7:30 min
In Artur Zmijewski’s videos KR WP, Polish soldiers are seen marching in a dance hall as if participating at a parade – fully dressed at first, then in the nude. They sing patriotic songs about soldiers, guns and women waiting for them, about soldiers released from the army, about drunkenness and violence.
The men invited to the dance studio by Zmijewski are former soldiers in the regular Polish army. They were specially trained to march in parades held in conjunction with political events. Because they march in a different context – a dance hall instead of parade grounds – and because they are naked and stripped of the customary collective protective covering their uniforms, the soldiers appear absurd and ridiculous but also vulnerable and intimate. The absence of uniforms and parade grounds calls attention to the representational character of the military context. As in Des Kaisers neue Kleider (The Emperor’s New Clothes), the soldiers appear as individuals without their outer uniform shells, while context-based power structures and ritualised politics of the body are exposed at the same time.
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Artur Zmijewski, KR WP, 2000
Videostill
Courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich
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