In 1981, Joseph Beuys performed the Polentransport action, during which he travelled by car from Düsseldorf to the Museum of Art in Łódź. The aim of this journey was to give over a thousand works to the museum, started at the end of the 1920s thanks to gifts from representatives of the international avant-garde. On the 35th anniversary of the artist’s famous action, the Polish-German duet Polen Performance returned to Düsseldorf to give the archives of their artistic output to the Kunstpalast Museum. The performers of Deutschlandtransport said:
In a time of migration and economic crisis, we are going to reverse Beuys’s act and transport ourselves back in this chest.
The action of Justyna Los and Mikołaj Sobczak, members of the Polen Performance group, is a perverse answer to Beuys’s original action. Antoni Burzyński, the curator of the project, writes that the gift gave more benefits to the givers than to the institution itself:
When Beuys brought his works to Łódź, he was a celebrity in the art world. From that point of view, one can say that on the art circuit, dominated by the market, the Kunstpalast Museum receiving Deutschlandtransport is a gift for Polen Performance, because it automatically pushes up their symbolic capital.
The chest, along with the two performers, contains documentation of their previous actions: different objects used in their previous performances as well as a USB hard drive with pictures and recordings of them. Antoni Burzyński said in an interview with Culture.pl:
These objects tell the story of particular performances. The animals and masks were used in Thank You for Performance! at the Contexts Festival 2016 in Sokołowsko. There are also the receipts from their realisation at the Villa Straylight opening. From the moment of their foundation, Polen Performance has realised performances to order. At the opening of the Centre For Contemporary Art in Ujazdowski Castle, under the nickname Vernissage Service, they gave opening services on the basis of receipts presented by the visitors. Receipts were given, for instance, for negative or approving comment about the exhibition, a massage, or a refill of wine.