In the bilingual (English/German) edition of Trembling Bodies, Conversations with Artists by Artur Żmijewski (English and German version) Polish artists Paweł Althamer, Katarzyna Górna, Andrzej Karaś, Grzegorz Kowalski, Katarzyna Kozyra, Zbigniew Libera, Jacek Markiewicz, Joanna Rajkowskaand Monika Zielińska open up about their thoughts on the current state of the art world at the cusp on the 21st Century. The book enjoys its official premiere at the Berlinale International Film Festival in February 2011.
These conversations, conducted between 1993 and 2004, express radical artistic positions analyzed through the lens of everyday-life, and social and political transformations. This corpus of texts appears as a major document relating the evolutions of Polish art from the 1990s to the present. Żmijewski is not a neutral interlocutor: he expects and draws out explanations and demands truth, much like an investigator. He pursues the explosive material that enabled the foundation of "critical art" - the only cultural movement in post-communist Poland - to openly confront our own social imaginations. Żmijewski's book appears as a friendly farewell to "critical art", and as a will to formulate a new program of artistic actions, described by the author in his manifesto Applied Social Arts.
Trembling Bodies contains also texts by Ariane Beyn, Stanisław Ruksza and conversation by Sebastian Cichocki with Artur Żmijewski.
Artur Żmijewski (b. 1966) is a video artist, sculptor and curator. He is associated with the Foksal Gallery Foundation and serves the Art Editor of the Polish journal Krytyka Polityczna / Political Critique. He graduated in 1995 from the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he studied in Grzegorz Kowalski's "Kowalnia", a famous workshop that encouraged several generations of art students to produce transgressive and experimental works. His film The Repetition represented Poland during the 51st Venice Biennale. His works have been presented at Documenta 12 in Kassel, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, or KunstWerke in Berlin. He is the winner of the Ordway Prize 2010, awarded by Creative Link and the New Museum in New York for exceptional contributions to visual arts. He has recently been appointed curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale in 2012.
- Artur Żmijewski, Trembling Bodies, Conversations with Artists
Edited by: Galeria Kronika & DAAD Berlin
The book's launch takes place at the DAAD Galerie in Berlin (Zimmerstrasse 90/91) on February 10, 2011 at 19:00. A talk featuring Joanna Rajkowska, Stanisław Ruksza and Artur Żmijewski begins.