Artur Zmijewski: Singing Lesson

Singing Lesson by the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski will be seen - and heard - in the Kunsthalle Studio. The video from 2000 shows young choristers rehearsing a song in a church. What makes the situation so exceptional is that the singers are all deaf. Their interpretation of J. S. Bach's choral cantata and of Jan Maklakiewicz's Polish Mass is literally unheard-of.

Artur Zmijewski's art allows people to be themselves and situations to get out of hand. The deaf choir's concert also contains such potential miscarriage. Zmijewski asked young hearing-impaired people and professional musicians to rehearse a choral work, and recorded the rehearsals in churches in Warsaw and Leipzig. The Polish children had never sung before. The curriculum of the German school for the deaf did include music, but choral singing was new to the pupils.

The work astounds with its strange world of sound. Singing Lesson is a lesson not only for the performers, but also for the viewers/listeners, who have their own ideas about what the human voice and music should sound like. But the work also gives voice to the voiceless. The choristers are excited about the new experience and are clearly having fun. Singing Lesson examines the boundaries of language and communication. Zmijewski was inspired by Oliver Sack's Seeing Voices. Journey into the World of the Deaf (1989), which portrays sign language as evidence of the fathomless potential of the human mind and its ability to invent ways to communicate in the most hopeless of situations.

Artur Zmijewski has addressed the human condition through disability in his earlier work as well. He depicts disabled people directly, with dignity but not without humour. Disabilities are seen as part of their humanity, something that need not be hidden. The tension arises from the confrontation between the different and the "normal". The poignancy of Zmijewski's work also stems from the feelings of conflict and discomfort that the viewers experience when confronted with their own attitudes.

Artur Zmijewski (b. 1966) lives and works in Warsaw. He participated in the Helsinki International Artist-in-residence Programme (HIAP) in October-November 2004. His videos An Eye for an Eye (1998) and Out for a Walk (2001) were screened in the Kaiku Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts in October 2004. An Eye for an Eye won the Italian Guarene Arte prize in 2000. Singing Lesson was premiered at the Manifesta biennial in 2002.

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Artur Zmijewski
Singing Lesson