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Me & Aids

Me & Aids
/5
    • Me & Aids
    • Ja i Aids
  • 1996
  • video, color, sound
  • 3min, 32sec
The struggle between bodies acted out in “Me and AIDS” is a great example of Zmijewski’s radical experimentation with the human body, its physicality and its objectification, and is also quite typical of “Kowalnia,” professor Grzegorz Kowalski’s studio class at the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, which Zmijewski attended between 1990 and 1995. Kowalski’s students always exhibited an enormous openness toward performing naked, without shame, treating their bodies (and themselves) as the medium, technique, object, and transgressive-critical tool. It goes without saying that the body was probably their favorite medium during the 1990s. In 1995, the year before Zmijewski filmed “Me and AIDS”, he made a related “humanoidal” film with Katarzyna Kozyra (“Powsciagliwosc i praca” / “Temperance and Work”) in which both of them physically bothered each other’s bodies (“objects”) to the extreme (“informel”), revealing an oppressive aspect of women’s/men’s physical interaction. In “Me and AIDS”, a woman (Eliza Twaróg) and two men (Mariusz Maciejewski and Artur Zmijewski) perform a painful ritual: bumping into each other with their naked bodies being subjected to direct pain, treated as inter-physical, alienated “objects”. According to Zmijewski, the most important aspect of the film was the collision of two people, analogous to real-life endangerment, with the title ‘AIDS’ being a symbolic, existential fulfillment of that collision. This film was made for an eponymous exhibition that was conceived by Zmijewski and Grzegorz Kowalski in 1996 and also featured works by Kozyra and Althamer; it was presented at the Stolica Cinema in Warsaw, and it was—spectacularly—closed by the cinema managers (to be reopened later at Jacek Markiewicz's a.r.t. gallery in Plock). Perhaps unintentionally, the body language and gender-drama in the film recalls Marina Abramovic’s and Ulay’s performances of the 1970s, focused on the “collision” or “union” between women’s/men’s bodies. B.P.