Europe

Artur Zmijewski

Zeppelintribüne

2002-2005

Artur Zmijewski, Zeppelintribüne, 2002-2005. Video.

Zeppelintribüne by Artur Zmijewski was shot near the Zeppelintribune in Nuremberg, designed by Albert Speer, chief architect of the Third Reich. The 360-meter-long structure is part of a larger architectural complex called the Zeppelinfeld, which the National Socialist used for their marches and rallies. The Zeppelintribune was immortalized in the Leni Reifenstahl’s film-propaganda masterpiece the Triumph of the Will, a record of a 1934 Nazi Party rally. The Zeppeltribune was destroyed by degrees, beginning as early as 1945, when the Americans, who held a victory parade there, blew up a large swastika on the roof. In the 60s, the columns and side-reinforcement were removed, further stripping the ruin of embarrassing architectural allusions to the past. Zmijewski thought of it as a place of pilgrimage for tourists, also as a neglected and dirty place in Germany. In this work, he alludes to how the nation inadvertently works in solidarity to destroy the past. The film features fragments of fascist newsreels from the 1930s, mixed with Zmijewski’s own footage of a pair of Turkish artists in residence in Germany, dubbed the Arbeitsmänner (“workmen”). Shovel in hand, the artists parade around with spades in front of the tribune, parodying the military drill ritual leaving us with a film about impersonation and memory, memory so perverse that it persuades tourists to raise their hand in the gesture of the Nazi salute.

In most of his work Artur Zmijewski uses the same tested method: he devises a scenario, sets up a situation, and introduces a group of individuals to participate and experiment with how they react. He films them and rarely takes part in the act himself. The other half of his work consists in editing the material. Through editing, Zmijewski sets up his argument, emphasizes important moments, and conjures, more than often, a highly emotive plot, which leaves the films looking like self-directed documentaries. An inseparable part of this strategy is exposing the project’s participants to the experience of emotion, where more than often he is personally involved. The nature of his work, an inseparable connection to documentation and the truth of human emotions, betrays the syndrome of disbelief in representation, depiction, and mediated expression. The artist belongs to a generation of Polish artists who in the 1990s experienced the transformation of their world, a transformation that language failed to keep pace with. The exhaustion of language, the wearing away of public discourse, is doubtless a measure of the crisis of social communication. The strangeness of the seemingly familiar body is also one of Zmijewski’s major themes. It can be literal and occur in prosaic circumstances stripped of any surrealist marvel. And yet it has explosive force and political effects. Artur Zmijewski was born in 1966 in Warsaw. he lives and works in Warsaw, Poland.

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Artur Zmijewski Zeppelintribüne

Artur Zmijewski

Zeppelintribüne