A monument to workers divided by nationality

A Polish artist has made a documentary about Irish-Polish relations, but it doesn’t shine a positive light on our attitudes

HE HAS been called a political opportunist, a sadistic puppet-master and snubbed by the New York Timesas a "globe-trotting avant-gardist". Polish video artist Artur Zmijewski dismisses the sniping of the critics, calling them "ignorant". But Two Monuments, Zmijewski's Dublin documentary, confirms that his work is nothing if not controversial.

When Zmijewski came from Warsaw to Dublin to make a project for Firestation Artists’ Studios from 2008 to 2009, the labour market was in heated recession. Used to working on the fringes, he felt at home in Firestation’s north inner-city neighbourhood.

When he met with the Polish community – numbering about 100,000 in Dublin at the time – he was struck by the numbers affected by the downturn. He found 12 unemployed Polish and Irish, gave them a wage and filmed them in the studio making two large sculptures.

These "monuments" have been carried by crane to the privileged sanctuary of the RHA for a month-long exhibition. Two Monuments, accompanying them, is a perplexing 14-minute take on Polish-Irish social relations. Zmijewski divides the participants, who are carpenters, welders, builders, textile workers, cooks and cleaning ladies, into groups of men and women. Each group creates a structure symbolic to them, emphasising the ideas of "equality" and "co-operation" in the designs.

But the video is really about the conflicts and tension that emerge during collaboration, tapping into a casual racism directed at the Polish. Perhaps it’s a careful, vilifying manipulation of attitudes in the editing, but the message is not one of Irish warmth but rather “We can’t get a job with all you Polish. We want you out.”

The quiet tirades against "foreigners" make for distinctly uncomfortable viewing. We wonder if this is art we are watching at all, and how it got to be so. Like reality television, Two Monumentsis an interesting social experiment, but crude as a kitchen sink. Still, when you place people together like this, what is unpacked might truthfully reflect how relationships panned out in the workforce during the boom.

Zmijewski is part of a generation of leftist Polish artists who respond to their experience under Communist rule in the Eastern Bloc. He has achieved looming international stature in the past decade. This year he won the prestigious Ordway Prize of $100,000 (€73,300), and he will curate the Berlin Biennale 2012. But his work seems incompatible with such glamour. The videos, termed “social studios”, come under the buzzword rubric of “relational aesthetics”. This means that by provoking certain scenarios he tries to smash the barriers of art-scene elitism. He invites ordinary people who are in some way marginalised or disenfranchised, people with disabilities, or individuals scarred by history, to take part.

Two Monumentsis a tame excursion coming from an artist whose work causes dismay and moral repulsion. The cynically named Democracies(filmed partly in Ireland and also showing at the RHA) is split-screen footage of public demonstrations in cities including Belfast, Warsaw, Berlin and Tel Aviv. Repetition gruellingly re-enacts the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment; in 80064a frail Auschwitz survivor is persuaded to have the number on his arm redrawn by a tattoo artist; and, also disturbing, The Game of Tagplaces men and women dancing naked around reconstructed gas chambers.

Zmijewski moved to video art because, he says, “life was too complicated for sculpture”. A wide audience can be reached and affected. He admits there is an element of trickery in the process: “People are very well-trained to read movies. They don’t see that it was transformed, redesigned, rearranged, rewritten.”

The work can appear cavalier and even degrading. The artist is like the omniscient narrator directing the plot, using vulnerable people and not fictional characters. But who could disagree with him when he says that art must restore itself and “rethink its relationship to society”?