Wojtek Doroszuk
Festin
2013, HD Video, Sound
20' 15", Edition 5/8+1
About the Work
Festin takes as its inspiration the paintings of the 17th century Flemish still life artists, such as Frans Snyder, Jan and Ferdinand Van Kessel who depicted sumptuous spreads of food, often garnished with dead animals which have been recently shot. Further alluding to Peter Greenaway’s scenes of sumptuous decay, Festin envisages a feast interrupted by an unknown calamity, a world from which human beings have disappeared. The film portrays a timeless vanitas tableau of decay and disorder where non-existent guests have been usurped by the uninvited intrusion of insects and stray dogs. This imagery creates a post-apocalyptic epilogue for humankind, a portent of what may result if human greed continues to grow unabated. Seeing this work in the context of the war in Ukraine, one cannot help but imagine a last supper left to rot, the guests fleeing to join the streams of refugees displaced by battles on city streets, closer to home than any of us could have imagined mere months ago. The ubiquity of war, even today in our seemingly enlightened age, renders this contemporary vanitas that much more timeless.
About the Artist
Wojtek Doroszuk (born 1980, Poland) is a visual artist. He works with video and photography. He is interested in society as a spectacle and a series of conventions which he tries to deconstruct. He asks why we so easily reconcile ourselves to the existing, what is repressed, and invokes the stranger. In his Istanbul project, consisting of a series of aestheticized postcards with non-standard views, hidden from tourists, and information like this on the back, and the film triptych Picnic, Lunch I and Lunch II (2005), he shows the impossibility of communication, translation of behavior and cultural habits. It draws attention to colonial conditioning and orientalist perceptions, which are visible even despite the political correctness of conscious Europeans. Similar themes recur in Free Cracow Tour (2005), a mystified walk around Krakow for foreigners, a work she created with Anna Szwajgier, or Video Party (2006), a party at which foreign students staying in Poland play alleged games typical of Poles. He has exhibited at Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia (2019), Maksla XO Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania (2018), Arsenal Gallery, Białystok, Poland (2016), Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris (2013), EKKM, Tallin (2011), lokal_30, Warsaw, Poland (2010), Platan Gallery, Budapest, Hungary (2010), Main Train Station of Ankara, Turkey (2007), Sala Verónicas, Centro Párraga, Murcia, Spain (2007), Container Gallery, Roma, Italy (2006). He lives and works in Kraków.