The sculpture was created in 2007, based on a drawing made by Althamer after a hypnotic seance in 2003. The meeting was a part of the Tak zwane fale i inne fenomeny umysłu / So gennante Wellen und andere Phänomene des Geistes project, presented in Dusseldorf in 2003 at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen exhibition. In a series of films shot at the time by Artur Żmijewski, Althamer experiments with different states of consciousness. Under hypnosis, the artist saw himself as a small Jewish boy, wandering the ruins of Warsaw with his dog.
Abram and Buruś is a non-monument in a city filled with monuments which, full of pathos, commemorate historical events. Althamer questions the idea of monumental sculpture: its scale, apparent timelessness and social significance, but not through fragmentation, instability or randomness of the materials. His work is not typical because of its size (less than 120cm in height), material (bronze, which is usually reserved for objects on public squares) and location (a lawn near a local shop, where people take their dogs for walks). Operating inside the limits of traditional craft, Althamer turns it into an object placed on a pedestal, engulfed by the great blocks from the 1970s. In this context, an individual and private story becomes a story placed in collective memory.
Abram and Buruś is yet another project Althamer made for the district of Bródno, where he’s been living since he was a child. In an exhibition organized in 1997 in A.R. Gallery and Tęcza Cinema, he showed objects found and created through spontaneous actions by the local inhabitants (like a stone painted by a housekeeper, or a door with a painting of a naked woman), and in 2000 he realised a project for which the inhabitants of his residential block turned their lights on or off to create the inscription ‘2000’ on the block's facade. Three years later, during an exhibition at the Zachęta Gallery, Althamer used part of the budget to renovate one of Bródno's playgrounds.
Paweł Althamer Abram and Buruś
A sculpture in Warsaw's public space
Localisation: a lawn on 13 Krasnobrodzka Street, next to the Bródno-Podgrodzie bus terminus.
Inauguration of the project: December 19th 2008, 10:00 AM.