“Contact zones” stood for Zarębski’s multi-sensual performances whose goal was to elicit not only intellectual engagement but also to lead to the sphere of emotions and sensations of the viewer.
Perceptive and sensual refreshment consisted in innovative operations of contrasting activities, textures and hues. In the film Contact Zones, it is expressed through an ongoing juxtaposition of images of the public sphere of Warsaw in the 1970s and the scenes of private, erotic rituals performed by Zarębski and people from his immediate circle.
In this work, the artist, who “spent his whole life looking for the radical mystery of Eros”, is very bold at tackling the problems of the body and eroticism. Presenting the naturalist images of sexual practices, Zarębski radically transgresses the limits of the hitherto models of representing the body in art, attacking and consciously breaching the dominant taboo of communist Poland.
However, the exceptional aesthetic refinement of the representations and situating them in the convention of activities with objects has a partly neutralising effect on the provocative dimension of the presented images.
References: K. Piotrowski, Krzysztof Zarębski. Erotematy słabnącego Erosa. Przyczynek do dziejów sztuki performance w Polsce i Stanach Zjednoczonych po 1968 roku, CCA Elektrownia, Radom 2009; Ł. Ronduda, Polish Art of the 70s. Avant-garde, Warsaw 2009.
(ŁM)
Year: 1975
Duration: 3’45’’
Language: no sound
Source: 16 mm
© Krzysztof Zarębski
Ownership form: deposit
