Enrique Ježik
My Century
Curated by Agnieszka Kulazińska
Opening on 14 May, 6.00 p.m.
Exhibition until 19 June
Enrique Ježik (1961, Córdoba, Argentina) is a contemporary conceptual Argentinian artist living and working in Mexico for nearly twenty years. His work focuses on issues of power and media manipulation of information. The artist has developed a multidisciplinary activity mainly dedicated to analysing - from different angles and using different strategies - the forms that can be assumed by terror: wars, urban demonstrations, information manipulation, the use of weapons or small mechanisms of daily control in surveillance systems. He often uses destructive actions as a way to unmask the processes of violence that characterise our era.
His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions in key galleries and museums such as Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, Museo Carrillo Gil, Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City); Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires;) MeetFactory (Prague); Le Confort Moderne (Poitiers); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid); Sala Parpalló (Valencia); Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin); Musée des Beaux Arts (Montreal); L'Oeil de Poisson (Quebec); M'ARS Gallery (Moscow); WhiteBox (New York).
The project realised in Gdańsk is based on Günter Grass's book "My Century", published at the end of the 20th century. In this book, the author creates a picture of a passing epoch constructed from short stories presenting the subsequent years of the 20th century, from 1900 to 1999. Each chapter of the publication represents another year. The book has dozens of narrators, witnesses of the era, people diverse in terms of gender, age, education, occupation and views on life. Their stories portray the 20th century as an age of crime and clownishness, of "terrible seriousness" and sneering laughter*.
Enrique Ježik's installation uses a quotation from Chapter 33, referring to the year 1933, specifically a sentence uttered by the painter Max Liebermann at the sight of Nazis marching through the Brandenburg Gate. The sentence is used by the artist to pose questions about the circularity of history, to reflect on power and ideology capable of controlling the mind of an individual, and the ability of the human collective to resist evil.
It is yet another exhibition in the Cities on the edge series. The cycle aims to present art from liminal areas - beyond the borders of our interests, associated more with conflicts than art. As part of the series, works by artists from Cuba, Colombia, Iran, Chile and the Palestinian National Authority, among others, have been presented.
* As cited in Zaworska, H. Porachunki Grassa, https://www.wprost.pl/tygodnik/7527/porachunki-grassa.html