KwieKulik: Activities with Dobromierz

Issue 40, April 2010. See the entire magazine online here.

Zak|Branicka, Berlin
5 February – 13 March

By David Ulrichs

Przemysław Kwiek and Zofia Kulik worked together as KwieKulik from 1971 to 1987. Completed between 1972 and 1974 – and shown in part during Documenta 12 and at last year’s Istanbul Biennial – Activities with Dobromierz incorporates the Polish duo’s young son into their work. It consists of 900 photographs, 400 of which are here projected as slides. Whether on the floor of their kitchen or living room, surrounded by onions or oranges, or in a bucket, toilet, sink or bathtub, their often-naked baby boy, Dobromierz, is photographed in various calculated positions. These are not the normal photographs parents take to document a son’s childhood. Every single element is meticulously placed, and the arrangement of objects is based on a previous installation developed by the duo entitled Activities with the Unknown X, or the Table with ‘Xs’, which linguistically dealt with three different mathematical-logical operations. ‘X’ refers to three different types of situations: that something could happen; that something might happen but normally does not; or that something usually does not happen. In Activities with Dobromierz, the duo’s child replaces ‘X’ and, in an almost documentary style, is shown in situations that range from the conventional to the absurd or even shocking.

Often presented in a triptych layout, obviously alluding to the three operations, the photographs slowly fade in and out in a seemingly random way. Appearing in a loosely chronological fashion, they not only illustrate various complicated mathematical propositions but also chart the first two years in the life of Maksymilian Dobromierz, who is now teaching economics near London. Four hundred images flash before our eyes in 30 minutes, and by the end we are none the wiser. The little boy appears with a variety of household items: his head pops out of a mopping-bucket or a sink, or disappears completely under a red blanket. He finds himself lying on the floor, naked, surrounded by a circle of partly clothed onions, or with his arm shoved inside a goose’s half-gutted carcass. While on the surface these images are nothing like the glossy work of cute-baby photographer Anne Geddes, there appears to be a deeper similarity, since babies crawling in and out of cabbages seem just as surreal as a baby taking a bath in a toilet bowl.

Ultimately, Activities with Dobromierz is part of the larger documentation of artistic life in Poland in the 1970s and 80s that KwieKulik undertook. (The pair stopped collaborating in 1987, two years before the end of the Communist regime; they now live as neighbours on the same street in Warsaw.) Inevitably, then, a political dimension also resounds through this series. Yet the intellectual preoccupation with mathematics, the (perhaps unintentional) references to another great artist duo, Gilbert & George, active on the other side of the Iron Curtain around the same time, and the poor, studentlike interior which serves as the backdrop for a new life mean that the series with their son is not only probably their most deeply collaborative work, but is also imbued with optimism and hope.

See this article with full illustrations, plus the entire April issue of ArtReview magazine free on your screen, here.