Heavy-weight History
Christian Jankowski’s retrospective at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle spans twenty years of the German artist’s most successful videos, performances and participatory experiments. The expansive survey includes sixteen of Jankowski’s most notable works and consumes most of the Centre’s second floor. The comprehensive nature of this survey enables its audience to witness the thematic development of the concepts to which Jankowski has devoted himself since the early ’90s. The evolution of his practice has been elucidated through the curatorial direction of Ewa Gorządek, who resisted a chronological ordering of the artist’s work in favour of establishing thematic links between his projects.
Jankowski has used this survey to debut a new work, which also serves as the exhibition’s title, Heavy-weight History (2013)—a pre-recorded video of a sports competition invented by the artist and complimented by a series of striking photographs taken throughout this pseudo-competition. In the video, a group of Polish heavy-weight lifters attempt to lift a number of Warsaw’s historic monuments. Accompanied by professional sports commentary, the athletes lift several popular statues from around the city, but fail to lift others whose histories are deemed ‘too heavy’ to move. The work asks how we are to digest history and collective identity within a system of globalised capitalism, and what role mass media plays in influencing our consumption of events.
Other works worthy of mention include The China Painters (2007–2008), an extensive series of paintings commissioned by Jankowski and executed by artist laborers from the Chinese city of Dafen, from where the vast majority of forgeries of the Old Masters originate. Jankowski asked the workers to paint a canvas depicting the interior of a partially constructed art gallery, and