Artur Żmijewski

Artur ŻMIJEWSKI (1966, Poland) is a visual artist, photographer and filmmaker. Between 1990 and 1995 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, within the Department of Sculpture. In 1999 he created the controversial work Game of Tag, in which naked people are seen playing tag in the gas chamber of the former Stutthof concentration camp. His works featuring people with mental or physical disabilities have also drawn significant public attention. Żmijewski’s work has been exhibited in group shows, as well as solo exhibitions at (amongst others) Documenta 12, Manifesta 4, Kunsthalle Basel, MOMA in New York, Cornerhouse in Manchester, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Franscisco, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the National Gallery of Art Zacheta in Warsaw, and he also represented Poland at the 51st Art Biennale in Venice in 2006. In 2010, he was appointed curator of the seventh Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art 2012, for which he published the manifesto The Applied Social Arts and (again controversially) opened up the curatorial process to direct collaboration with the artists, characteristic of his socio-politically engaged and critical views on power relations, representation and democratisation of the art world. Since 2006 he has also been the artistic editor for Krytyka Polityczna, a highly regarded Polish socio-political magazine. In 2018, IFFR is dedicating a retrospective to the work of Artur Żmijewski.