Zbigniew Libera, "History Lesson", 2012, dibond, 140 x 349 cm
The fearless Polish artist presents his latest photography series, illuminating society's apocalyptic visions of the future and anarchist dreams
Produced over the past year, these works follow the trail of Libera's earlier Positives, Masters and La Vue series, casting a critical eye on the most traumatic issues that contemporary society has to deal with. The artist plays with the image in a way that incorporates memory to shift the order of history. The traumas of the best are brought to the surface in order to grapple with nightmarish visions of the future. He takes on the role of an engaged cultural critic, standing on the sidelines, showing us what we are sometimes too involved, too busy or simply too afraid to see. The images bring back tropes of political and social discord - the figure of the "other", power struggles, exclusion, colonisation and liberation - producing striking images that provoke lively discussion. He merges styles of pseudo-amateur photography to put an innocent face on what is often a jarring idea: a daring form of self-expression, for instance, or an engaged critique of social phenomena such as consumerism or even art itself.
The exhibition is accompanied by an album of Libera's photographs from 1982 to 2012, with commentary by German scholar Dr. Martin Maneke. Maneke writes:
Libera never ceases to lay bare the artificiality and ‘artificiality’ of photography – its arbitrary, artistic nature prevents him from forgetting that each image is a creation, half-way between a record of reality and interpretation. He also deliberately uses the illusive nature of photography – drawing upon the fact that we instinctively believe the truth of a photograph to tell us stories that never happened. For language is, above all, a medium of communication, but it is also a basic tool of persuasion and manipulation.
Zbigniew Libera (born 1959) began his artistic career in the early 1980s. Reacting to the introduction of martial law in Poland in December 1981, he printed leaflets and posters protesting the bloody suppression of strikes at the Wujek coal mine in the nation's southwest. He later took up notions of the body, examining how old age and society's norms of health and beauty impact our perception of aesthetics and the human form. Libera also dealt with the issue of the socialisation of boys and how society shapes their attitudes toward women.
In recent years Libera has devoted himself to analyzing the media and the significance of the image in mass culture, creating controversial works including the Lego Concentration Camp, a model of a Nazi prison camp made from the toy blocks. He turned to photography to create works such as the Positives series (2002-2003), using iconic images associated with war and destruction, staging "positive" scenes that replicated the familiar image, such as soldiers lighting a cigar for a semi-recumbent man instead of Che Guevara, men on bicycles lifting a road barrier instead of German soldiers breaking through a border crossing, or smiling figures in striped costumes instead of concentration camp inmates.
Zbigniew Libera's New Histories is on at the Raster Gallery in Warsaw between the 17th of November - 12th of January 2013. For more information, see: raster.art.pl
Editor: Agnieszka Le Nart
Source: Press information