Body

Body determines a personal, intimate sphere of a given individual, while for the artist it is one of basic means of expression, which is available literally “at hand”. Therefore it is only natural that it functions in art as one of the most important themes as well as the matter of creative activities.

In the Bunkier Sztuki Collection you can find numerous works in which body functions as an independent theme, but also a pretext to convey content that transcends interpretation in purely aesthetic terms. Human body – including one that is crippled, old or other – offers a possibility to tell countless stories, enter into dispute with the fixed canons of beauty, a sense of good taste and finally adress difficult and thorny, but socially significant issues.

The distinctive series among these is the one whose hero is the artist himself. In an empty studio he arranged a secret performance, whose only witness was the camera and only evidence an image on photographic film. The successive frames show the artist lying on a dusty floor. Long exposure allowed the artist to capture the ephemeral nature of the activity. As a result, the figure immersed in a dark background is blurred, hardly visible for the viewer, anonymous.

The photo series Fragility Has a Singular Beauty is part of a project alluding to the theory of Five Phases of Transformation, which ascribes stages in human life to the cycle of five seasons. In the photos Małgorzata Markiewicz poses dressed successively in five old dresses. According to the artist, clothing provides a curtain for the body, a specific mask we are forced to put on.

Double Portrait is a reflection on passing and the sense of existence in the form of a photograhic triptych. An important aspect of the compositions is foregrounding cross-generational relations.

Alicja Żebrowska views the subject in the light of a story of a specific person who ran the risk of taking a radical decision about their identity in spite of biological determinant. The artist depicted her heroine in a classic, lying posture among glossy drapery. The key element of the composition is the mirror, in which the sitter is looking at her body and facing what, as the title says, has become “one's own”.

Alicja Żebrowska clearly refers to the motif of nudity often recurrent in painting and deals with the stereotypical idea of beauty and the problem of self-acceptance by transsexual people.

The facial features, clothes and accessories that oscillate between the masculine and feminine encourage the viewer to revise the culturally fixed patterns and gender distinctions. Thus the artists pose the question whether it is possible to resign from classifications, final decisions and statements.

They were created with a mural in mind, which was to be placed in the Warsaw Rising Museum, but which eventually wasn't realised. The depiction of a wounded rebel proposed by Karol Radziszewski differs from the popular images of man – a soldier and a hero. The undisguised, erotic interest in the beauty of male body corresponds to the provocative gesture of licking a finger. By questioning the hegemony of sterotypical masculinity the artist argues with the historic iconography of male heroes.

Belly belongs to a series of photographs by Jadwiga Sawicka showing parts of human body against the background of claret-coloured faux fur. The centrally placed male belly of considerable size and deprived of its owner because of its autonomy evokes emotions oscillating between surprise and disgust.

In the series of three photographs against neutral white background the artist arranged a scene in which she replaces the missing leg with the eponymous fake leg. Starting from her personal experience the artist talks about disability with a pinch of humour, in a way that is subtle and far from dramatising.

In videos and photographs their disability recedes into the background: they are presented as strong, independent, self-reliant persons, whose bodies constitute an integral whole. Their disability reveals itself only in other people's eyes despite the fact that the women themselves perfectly overcome various physical, architectural or social barriers.