Artur Zmijewski

“Where is the world?!” wails a group of Palestinian women in Jerusalem during a weekly protest against Israeli occupiers in Artur Zmijewski’s singularly brilliant new video Democracies, 2009, one of two documentaries by the Polish artist that compose this exhibition. The women’s angry lament is a sobering corrective to 1980s-era sing-alongs like “We Are the World.” But their cry is also echoed by the marching crowds in the twenty-some public gatherings of varying political tenor—street demonstrations, state funerals, war reenactments, nationalistic football rioting, and mass religious services—that Zmijewski and a small crew shot in Europe and the Middle East over the past three years.

As individual works of up to ten minutes each, the videos feature Polish feminists pushing strollers while their jackboot-wearing countrymen decry them as Nazis, drunk German football fans exalting their flag while silenced Turkish kids watch on, and Israeli peaceniks facing off with their enraged, Arab-hating brothers. As a collective film running more than two hours, Democracies is a formal and political tour de force: examining the common visual language of protest—flags, religious paraphernalia, drums, and riot gear (as well as the diverging ones: reggae on the left, military bearing and haircuts on the right), while exploring how democratic citizenry responds to power and an often outsize lack of it.

In Two Monuments, 2009, Zmijewski tightens his focus, if not his ambition. The artist held two gender-separate workshops for Polish immigrants in Ireland and the working-class Irish who felt their skills were being supplanted. Both groups designed a public monument describing their relationship to the labor market and to each other. As Zmijewski films the women (mostly domestics) and the men (construction workers) brashly or haltingly discussing their feelings of resentment and powerlessness (“Out of work at the moment, and can’t get a job ’cause of you Polish”), building the monuments, and celebrating with drink and an impromptu jam session after, he delivers an uneasy visual essay on the global labor market—among political systems that tout democracy but whose economic policies rarely deliver it—that is as deft as it is dismaying. “Where is the world?!” the artist seems to be saying. Perhaps here, and as shell-shocked as ever.