Curator

Robert Kuśmirowski – born in 1973 in Łódź, author of installations, objects, photographs, drawings, performer. In 1998-2003, he studied at the Faculty of Arts of the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, where he obtained his diploma in the sculpture studio of Professor Sławomir A. Mieleszka. In the academic year 2002-2003, he held a scholarship at the Metal and Modelling Studio at the University of Rennes 2, Beaux-Arts Rennes (France). He lives and works in Lublin – since 2007 in the Department of Intermedia at the Institute of Fine Arts WA UMCS.

In 2003, he was ranked first by the online magazine ‘Raster’. He is the winner of the ‘Polityka’ Passports (2005) in the category of visual arts and the Annual Award of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in the field of visual arts (2011), as well as many other awards. His work has been featured in several hundred solo and group exhibitions around the world. He is associated with Galeria Foksal in Warsaw, Johnen Galerie in Berlin and Guido Costa Projects in Turin.

Kuśmirowski has been called by critics and interpreters a ‘genius of the dummy’, a ‘brilliant imitator’, a ‘forger and manipulator of reality’. Most of his works are based on reconstructing and copying old objects, documents, photographs or creating their deceptively similar imitations. As a rule, they do not have a specific original, but only evoke the material culture of a certain era. Invariably, however, they are characterised by accuracy and meticulousness. In the larger installations, the artist’s penchant for collecting is also revealed – the collected objects then form collections that are difficult to comprehend, described by Joanna Mytkowska as ‘the baroque of excess and entropy of detail’.

In this way, Kuśmirowski refers to the memory, history and nostalgia that accompany visual culture from the distant and nearer past slowly disappearing beneath successive layers. Thanks to this, a vanitas theme is also revealed in his works – the recreation of past material culture becomes a way of addressing the theme of transience, passing and death. His actions and performance activities, sometimes accompanied by music he composes, are also of a similar nature.

At the beginning of his career, Kuśmirowski made imitations and dummies of single, small objects such as postage stamps, photographs and prints. However, his debut at the Biała Gallery in Lublin in 2002 was astonishing in its scale. In the exhibition space, the artist, then still a fourth-year student, recreated an old railway station – there was a 1:1 scale copy of a freight car standing on a siding and a station waiting room. Original objects were also incorporated into the exhibition. The entire exhibition was accompanied by appropriately edited sounds characteristic of railways.

In 2003, at the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Kuśmirowski created a reconstruction of an artist’s studio from the communist period, filled with many objects, entitled ‘Double V’. Its space had a dual dimension – the mirror placed over a squalid washbasin was in fact a pane of glass, behind which disoriented viewers watched the same imitation of reality made by the artist in a mirror reflection. In a slightly modified version of this work prepared for Bytom’s Kronika gallery in 2004, Kuśmirowski inserted a venetian mirror into the wall, which unmasked the illusion effect used by the artist. The communist times were also evoked by the exhibition ‘Works’ in Gorzów Wielkopolski in 2006. It consisted of two parts: a contemporary one and one in the style of the 1960s. At the opening, the artist, with his typical meticulousness, staged two fictitious vernissages, watched by the audience from the mezzanine – at the vernissage of the 1960s, people smoked cigarettes, drank vodka and ate ‘wuzettes’, while the second vernissage reflected contemporary, more balanced customs. It also featured the artist himself dressed as a painting robot.

For the exhibition Palimpsest museum (Biennale of Art in Łódź, 2004), the artist created the ‘Balcony’, a fragment of the façade of a dilapidated building made of delicate and fragile materials, contrasting with the opulence of the Poznański Palace, where the exhibition took place. At the same time, a kind of play with the architectural space was played there – what should have been on the outside found its way inside.

Several of Kuśmirowski’s realisations feature the motif of water and the use of plumbing facilities. The installation ‘Fountain’ at Warsaw’s XX1 Gallery in 2003 was a reconstruction of a water pump room from long ago, brought to extreme perfection by Kuśmirowski – water with medicinal features flowed from the taps. In Cistern, located in front of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the artist recreated a village well referring to it (‘Yes, I’m a village’, 2004). In turn, at the exhibition ‘Hydrograf’ at the Białystok Arsenal (2004), the motif of water was combined with the theme of transience. Kuśmirowski’s recreations of a bathtub, a well and a steam engine featured ornate tombstone inscriptions and medallions with portraits. However, the theme of vanitas returned most literally in the installation ‘D.O.M.’ created at the Berlin gallery Johnen und Schottle (2004) and then repeated at the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw (2005). The artist transferred a fragment of a cemetery to the gallery, which on closer inspection turned out to be a cardboard and styrofoam dummy.

Kuśmirowski’s actions also take the form of romantic journeys. For the exhibition ‘Bicycle March’ at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig in 2003, the artist arrived on a bicycle made in the 1920s, dressed in period costume. He began his journey in Paris, 1,200 kilometres away. During his journey, he photographed himself so that the pictures resembled the old times as much as possible. The following year, he travelled on foot from Łódź to Paris, echoing Brăncuşi’s famous pilgrimage to the artistic capital of the world.

At the ‘Impossible Theatre’ exhibition in Vienna, London and Warsaw, Kuśmirowski showed the installation ‘Emitime’ (2005), in which he entered into a polemic with Tadeusz Kantor, recreating the space of a ‘dead classroom’ with the suggestion of placing school desks in transport crates crafted for this purpose.

In the project ‘The ornaments of anatomy’ (2005-2006), Robert Kuśmirowski played the role of the mysterious Dr. Vernier – researcher of anatomy and author of mysterious books. Under this guise, the artist revealed himself during performances (e.g. at the opening of the exhibition ‘Gazes’ at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw in 2006), but usually the viewers were confronted with the objects with which the scientist brought to life by Kuśmirowski was surrounded, and even whole spaces in which he functioned – the artist reconstructed a huge library , offices and laboratories filled with countless props. Numerous references to the romantic paradigm of the old inventor, present in the collective memory, could be found here, but at the same time the mechanism of constructing an intriguing image of the past from imagination mixed with scientific knowledge of it was also revealed.

Another long-term and several-stage project by Kuśmirowski was based on the utopian idea of turning back time and rejuvenating the body. At Galerie Magazin in 2007, he constructed a computer laboratory, ‘DATAmatic880’, in which scientists examined the artist’s body to see if it could undergo a rejuvenation experiment. During the performance, the artist impersonated one of the researchers. The rejuvenation process itself took place in the next stage of the project, at the CCA in Warsaw.

At the 2009 Beaufort Triennial in Blankenberge, Belgium, Kuśmirowski turned the facade of one of the townhouses into a hovel, or rather a dummy hovel. At the Barbican gallery in London in 2009, he created the impressive ‘Bunker’ – an imitation of a World War II bunker, abandoned, full of discarded equipment and rusty pipes, it changed the space beyond recognition. The installation evoked the atmosphere of war, as well as Cold War anxieties, while referencing the brutalist modernism of Barbican architecture.

The exhibition at the Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery (2009), entitled ‘Collector’s Massif’, can be regarded as a kind of summary of Kuśmirowski’s work to date, as well as a disclosure of his working methods and diverse fascinations with material culture. The artist displayed countless objects from his own collection, as well as exhibits from the fascinating collections of the well-known Krakow antiquarians – the Sosenko family. The collector’s order of the exhibition turned into horror vacui and an avalanche of objects difficult to contain.

In 2010, Kuśmirowski established the ‘Museum of Deposited Art’ at the Morra Greco Foundation in Naples. This was an unusual museum where deposited works were commissioned to be destroyed, burnt and their ashes placed in specially designed urns, identical museum modules. This radical variant of institutional critique can be read, on the one hand, as an ironic commentary on the semantic impoverishment of art in exhibition institutions and, on the other, as a natural process according to which art, like foodstuffs, has an expiry date. Twelve works were ‘musealised’ in Naples in this way, six of them by Kuśmirowski himself. The other six were acquired from other artists: Roman Ondak, Philip Akkerman, Rafał Bujnowski, Jan Gryka, Jacek Wierzchoś and R.E. Acres. The second instalment of the same project took place the same year in Lublin, and another a year later in Bytom’s Kronika.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the BWA in Bielsko-Biała in 2010, Kuśmirowski prepared a special project entitled ‘Autumn Exhibition’, inspired by the spatial arrangements of exhibition galleries from the 1960s and 1970s. Referring to them, the artist created a space, somewhat ‘from another era’, in the lower hall of the Bielsko-Biała gallery. Kuśmirowski’s source of this inspiration was photography from the Pavilion of the Visual Artists (the name of the gallery in 1960-75). The artist took some of the interior design from the photograph. He also designed visual information in a characteristic style. Potted plants, an indispensable element of exhibition halls at the time, were also present. In addition to works by lesser-known artists who used to exhibit in Bielsko-Biała, there were also works created by Kuśmirowski himself.

During the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2012. Kuśmirowski proposed the realisation, specially made for the abandoned space of the former veterinary school at Sommerhall, of a work entitled ‘Pain Thing’. This realisation, which alluded to the grim history of the site, portrayed the meaning and role of suffering through the staging of a failed animal experiment. Here, ‘Pain Thing’ remained for several more years as part of a permanent exhibition.

‘The art graduation tower’ is one of the artist’s largest works in terms of dimensions. The structure, created from coniferous wood, a system of various joints and wooden supports, refers, on the one hand, to the processes of constriction, thickening, condensation, and, on the other, to the function of improving the human condition, supporting the process of healing, convalescence. At the same time, it is a collection of objects collected by the artist for more than 12 years – retrieved from the lamppost, sorted and displayed in a new context. The construction of the art graduation tower was designed to allow the changes taking place in the object to be tracked. ‘The art graduation tower’ was mainly presented in the open air, subjected to atmospheric processes, slowly destroyed by rain and temperature changes. It went inside the building for the first time at Bialystok’s Arsenal Gallery in 2015. This one of Kuśmirowski’s best-known works has also been exhibited in Kielce’s Artists’ Square (2014), at the Labirynt Gallery in Lublin (2014-2015), in front of the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw (2016), in front of the Main Building of the National Museum of Art in Krakow (2017), in the courtyard of the Lublin Castle (2017-2018), and in Poznan’s Visual Park (2018).

Robert Kuśmirowski has been a frequent guest at the Open City / Open Art in Public Space Festival, and he began his collaboration with the Crossroads Centre with an installation inaugurating the opening of the headquarters of the newly established institution in 2008. ‘Portier’ is a recreation of a doorman’s office in the building at 39 Krakowskie Przedmieście St. The installation was presented for several years, as if time had stopped there and the eponymous doorman had only left his workstation for a moment, leaving behind an undrinkable coffee glass and a full ashtray.

During the first edition of the Open City Festival (2009, curator Waldemar Tatarczuk), he prepared a ‘plus/minus’ action, which consisted in hollowing out a spiral pit on one of the plots of land in Lublin. For part of the Festival, the artist worked on hollowing out the hole, and he could take a moment of rest in the shadow of a barracks built on the site. In 2012, curator Andrzej Krukowski invited Robert with his action ‘Kraszewski Square’. He presented himself in a pose – an image of the artist on the façade of a tenement house at 24 Grodzka Street in Lublin, which had fallen into disrepair.

In turn, in 2014 (curated by Jerzy Onuch), he made the installation ‘Stalkammer’ on Rybny Square in Lublin. ‘Stalkammer’ is a steel chamber. The object was intended to be a monumental representation of a picture frame or object frozen on the matte of a camera. The living figures frozen in the frame could be interpreted as a combined or separate image depending on the viewer’s perception.

‘Stalker II’ appeared in the space of Lublin during the 10th anniversary edition of the Open City Festival (curators Anna Nawrot, Mirosław Haponiuk). The steel installation dominated the space of the Old Town.

Robert Kuśmirowski is curator of this year’s edition of the Open City / Open City Festival of Art in Public Space, organised for the 14th time by the Centre for Intercultural Creative Initiatives ‘Crossroads’.

Robert Kuśmirowski’s realisations during the previous editions of the Open City Festival: