ZUZANNA JANIN
Pas de Deux, 2001
Fight (ILOVEYOUTOO), 2001

ARTIST BIO/CV

Boxing involves direct physical confrontation – no complications, no excuses, no words. Mano a mano, here and now – boxing is combat in the abstract, stripped down to its bare essentials. This sublime distillate of combat is neutral and graciously embraces every projection. In The Champion boxing was a metaphor of the ruthless drive to succeed where each knocked-down opponent brings the hero closer to his goal : a glance into the dark side of the American Dream. Its flip-side was Rocky – by slugging away at slabs of meat in a slaughterhouse freezer its hero showed how determination, blood sweat and tears, and self-confidence can move mountains. As heavyweight Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, Robert de Niro exposed the weakness latent within strength – if life is a struggle it always ends in defeat, because time is mercilessly working against the fighters. When the American Dadaist Arthur Cravan challenged the professional boxing champion of the time to an uneven contest, he was actually throwing down the gauntlet before the bloodless art of salons. Joseph Beuys also stepped into the ring, at documenta V in Kassel, donning gloves on behalf of direct democracy – using his fists to prove that socially committed art was not an aesthetic concept but a real-life struggle taken up by artists wanting to change the world….

In Zuzanna’s work, a woman and a man, the artist and professional boxer, are pitted against each other in identical white costumes and red training gloves. Their identical uniforms seem to suggest that both are on the same team. Zuzanna, a featherweight it would appear, is cast against a professional heavyweight boxer. The actual disproportion of strength does not matter: we are operating in arbitrary media space. A boxing champion is a TV celebrity, a semi-fictional character for most of us. Zuzanna likewise assumes the stance of a media heroine. Xena the Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lara Croft – pistol-packing daredevil, Trinity – Matrix martial-arts mistress, cybercop Motoko and other Grrrls have gotten us used to the idea that women in the pop culture know how to stand up for themselves. Size and weight are irrelevant – everyone’s a fighter here….

(Excerpts from text by Stach Szabłowski. Read complete text: click here.)

MAP OFFICE
Runscape Hong Kong, 2010

ARTIST BIO/CV

 
The City is growing Inside of us…
Runscape is a poetic act of resistance
Runscape is a politic act of defiance
of the urban authority
with its surveillance and restrictions on movement.
(Excerpt from film narration.)

RUNSCAPE (2010) is a film that depicts several young male figures sprinting through public spaces of Hong Kong, almost invariably via the visual mode of the long shot, while a narrator describes this action through the rhetoric of post-structuralist urban theory. This narration makes repeated reference to a range of texts from the psychogeographical dérive of urbanism in Guy Debord and the Situationists to the biopolitical machines of Gilles Deleuze and the literary styles of Jean-Luc Nancy. The runners both follow existing paths and establish new ones, moving in straight lines through crowds and across rooftops while also using exterior walls as springboards for less-likely forms of motion. This is, however, far from parkour; it is a much more purposeful action that claims a certain territory or at least trajectory described within the narration through the image of the body as a “bullet that needs no gun.” A soundtrack contributed by Hong Kong rock band A Roller Control complements this aesthetic violence, guiding the eye and ear of the viewer across this novel interpretation of the definition and uses of public space. In this action, invisible facades are constructed across a grid that spans the area between the codified signs of polished facades, an open-ended and performative notion of being-in-transit. (Robin Peckham)

For additional text by Melissa Lam: click here.