Polish artists Pawel Althamer and Artur Zmijewski present collaborative work for the first time in the UK.
Pawel Althamer and Artur Zmijewski take everyday social processes as the primary material for their art. Althamer moves freely between figurative sculpture and radical actions in which alienation and the isolation of the individual within society take centre stage. Zmijewski’s powerful and carefully orchestrated films focus on the human body, its imperfections and its limits within given situations. The artists’ overlapping interests have led to several collaborative projects in which the world becomes a kind of running film in which the banal and the flawed are transformed into something extraordinary.
For Arrivals: Poland, the artists present Pilgrimage (2003) at Modern Art Oxford and Turner Contemporary’s Droit House in Margate. First presented at Art Focus 4 in Israel in 2003, Pilgrimage takes the form of a quasi-documentary that follows a group of Polish Catholics on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. A journey focused on faith, caught up in the prosaic realities of religion, the film also reveals the paradoxical itineraries of history and the way certain histories persist over others.