Zbigniew Libera (PL)

Liberation (Bush’s dream)
2003
photograph
180 x 120 cm
series of staged photographs, published in “Przekroj” weekly magazine (13 April 2003)

How to Train the Girls
1987
video 20 min

The video was created as a result of the artist’s re-working of some video materials he found in his home video collection. It presents a four-year-old girl who is being instructed on some aesthetic rites of self-creation by an elderly woman. The peculiar slowing down of the image carries this fragment of human existence beyond the moment when it was registered. The video presents the sculpting of character, created not in the present moment but in a particular delayed time – the phase of active imagination.

http://raster.art.pl/gallery/artists/libera/libera.htm

Zbigniew Libera (1959) is one of the most interesting and important Polish artists. His works – photographs, video films, installations, objects and drawings – piercingly and subversively (in an intellectual way) play with the stereotypes of contemporary culture. In the mid-90s, Libera began to create "Correcting Devices" – objects which are modifications of already existing products – objects of mass consumption. He also designs transformed toys – works that reveal the mechanisms of upbringing, education and cultural conditioning, the most famous of which is his "Lego Concentration Camp". After the creation of that work, Libera began to be considered as one of the pillars of the so-called "critical art", even in the institutional sense – despite of the progress of his career he is still closely connected with independent circles. In recent years he has also been preoccupied with photography, especially the specificity of press photography and the ways in which the media shape our visual memory and manipulate the image of history.