Coinciding with Milan Art Week 2022, the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (PAC) opened Polish artist Artur Żmijewski’s first solo exhibition in Italy, titled “When Fear Eats the Soul”. Artur Żmijewski is considered as one of the most important radical figures on the Polish art scene. His work reflects a concern for the socio-political problems of our contemporary world, and through it the artist frequently examines the mechanisms of power and oppression within the existing social order.
The exhibition at PAC, curated by Diego Sileo, presents a selection of historical and recent works, including three new works conceived specifically for this Milanese project and produced by PAC, such as the new film inspired by the scientific cinema of the neurologist Vincenzo Neri and the photographic series Refugees/Cardboards, a long black and white photographic mural from which emerge human figures that look like refugees, men and women surrounded by darkness and desolation. The reference is to the many refugees on the Polish-Belarusian border during the summer and fall of 2021, but who today inevitably are also the image of the current war oppression in Ukraine.
Artur Żmijewski: When Fear Eats the Soul / PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan. Milan (Italy), March 29, 2022.
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Exhibition text:
The exhibition, curated by Diego Sileo, presents a selection of historical and recent works, including three new works conceived specifically for this Milanese project and produced by PAC, such as the new film inspired by the scientific cinema of the neurologist Vincenzo Neri and the photographic series Refugees/Cardboards, a long black and white photographic mural from which emerge human figures that look like refugees, men and women surrounded by darkness and desolation. The reference is to the many refugees on the Polish-Belarusian border during the summer and fall of 2021, but who today inevitably are also the image of the current war oppression in Ukraine.
His work reflects a concern for the socio-political problems of our contemporary world, and through it the artist frequently examines the mechanisms of power and oppression within the existing social order – as well as conflicts of various kinds that border on violence – while exposing the instinctive human inclination to evil. His works investigate the relationship between extreme emotions and their physical expressions, deal with the disruption of the human body and cognitive functioning in complex cases such as illness or disability, while also analyzing the mechanisms of memory and collective trauma.
Using symbolization, Zmijewski establishes an intricate system of representation in which fear unfolds in terms of social control. When fear becomes mistress of our lives, one can be tempted by overwhelming mechanisms or one can masochistically accept the yoke of submission; or one can play both roles simultaneously. Or one can simply try to understand when fear devours our soul. As Rainer Werner Fassbinder explains in his 1974 film – to which the title of the exhibition pays homage – “fear eats the soul” is an expression used by Arabs and North Africans to describe their condition as immigrants. A life full of fear, an existential fear of everything and everyone. Fear of a foreign and hostile environment, fear of not being able to see their loved ones again, fear of loneliness, fear of death, fear of poverty, fear of being forgotten, fear that no one will love you, fear of state racism. In PAC’s exhibition project, fear is also that of illness, mental disorders and disability, that fear of not being accepted, understood, the fear of what is different from us, the fear of what we don’t know and what scares us.
Żmijewski has exhibited in solo and group shows at museums and institutions around the world, including documenta 12 and 14, Venice Biennale, MoMA New York, Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. In 2012 he curated the seventh edition of the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.
