Description by Filmoteka Muzeum
Hangman<.i> as one of the artist’s favourite “icons of the end” is to be located among his works on death. For that matter, we could enumerate, e.g. “Armageddon (2004), Vanitas (2005), Father’s Pain (2010).
By visual means, Dawicki develops here his poetical and heavily existential narration, referring on the one hand to extremely holistic, universal aspects of the human condition; on the other, to a bitter ascertainment that the artist’s project of confirming the condition of collapse and death of art will never be fulfilled; it is only his own death that could put an end to it.
Visualising his own suicide, in Hangman Dawicki develops also a more general metaphor of human life and death. “Each of us is born with a rope around the neck, like the balloonist here: as children, we can’t feel it because the balloons keep lifting us high above the ground. As time goes by and we get older, there are fewer and fewer balloons to hold us and the rope tightens.”
Hangman also referred to as Balloonist, was created in the course of production of the feature film Performer, devoted to Oskar Dawicki's artistic practice. In the soundtrack, Dawicki makes an ironic reference to the difference between films produced at professional studios and amateur films characteristic of contemporary art.