2-27 Aug, daily at 11:00 am – 9:00 pm
Summerhall (venue 26) / 1 Summerhall (EH9 1PL)
Tickets: no admission charge
Age restrictions:16+
Robert Kuśmirowski's Installation
In Pain Thing, the Polish "expert in forgery", Robert Kuśmirowski addresses the former presence of a veterinary clinic that frequently performed tests on animals in the project's site
Though the clinic has discontinued all animal testing, evidence of the pain is still clear through several work stations and test devices that were left behind as proof of their experiments. Called "an expert in forgery and master of replication" by the Guardian, and "one of Europe's leading installation artists" by the BBC, Robert Kuśmirowski takes up the challenge of presenting the role of suffering throgh a purposely failed experiment. The artist explains:
My task is to operate decoratively to the extent necessary to tell and explicate the problem of anxiety, torment, waiting and stress. The veneer of paint used in the project should both distract attention from the problem and expose emotions inherent in it. “Pain Thing” has a double-meaning, in that the description of suffering plays with the painting practice which conceals it. A viewer entering the Summerhall will witness an unsuccessful experiment, which, fortunately for the visitorm, starts living its own life.
The Independent's review of various works shown at Summerhall recognises the artist's work:
Robert Kusmirowski (...) has replaced Summerhall's natural ghoulishness with one of his own in a work called Pain Thing. Threatening machines and stable walls splattered with blood - actually coffee, as your nose will reveal - suggest a vivisection experiment. For all that, there is something unexpectedly funny about Pain Thing and its Grand Guignol drama.
Robert Kuśmirowski is a performer and author of installations, objects, photographs, and drawings. Born in 1973, in Łódź, the artist lives and works in Lublin. Critics and interpreters usually call Kuśmirowski "the genius of fake", an "ingenious imitator", and a "counterfeiter and manipulator of reality". For the most part, his works are based on the reconstructing or copying of old objects, documents, photographs, of which he creates delusively identitical imitations. This strategy accounts for the recurring vanitas theme in his oeuvre – the reconstructing of a material culture of the past becomes a means of addressing the issues of transiency, vanishing, and death.