Filmoteka Muzeum

Obsession is an allegorical found footage film mix, featuring fragments of TV ads of Calvin Klein fragrances, feature films about the Nazis, and Leni Riefenstahl’s works from the 1930s. With added iconic images of the Third Reich – photos of Nazi architecture and sculptures by Albert Speer and Arno Breker.

Digging into the “unconscious” of contemporary advertising, the artist traces its aesthetic genealogy. Toporowicz’s analyses (with the element of allegorical meaning added to the films) reveal the extent to which contemporary commercialised visual culture maintains fascination with Nazi aesthetics.

The demonstrated approach of reaching “within the unconscious”, into the history and genealogy of the analysed representations is characteristic of postmodernist artists. It is the quality that differentiates them from the progessivist (futurist) projects of the modernist avant-garde, based on radical renouncement of history (tradition) and attempts at establishing a new social political order relying on “rational” utopia (legitimised e.g. by the “logic of history development”

Quoted from: Ł. Ronduda, Strategie subwersywne w sztukach medialnych, Cracow 2006.