FIVE

Slawomir Elsner – Uwe Wittwer

The dialogue, or rather its next episode, between painters Elsner and Wittwer was inspired by Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing (The Dekalog 5), the news of war and humanitarian crises permeating everyday life, and more generally a reflection on values. The artists decided to create a set of images relating to the multifaceted meaning of the tragedy of violent death that also includes issues of human dignity, violence, the suffering of victims, sense and nonsense, loss, the banality of evil, bearing witness, forgetting and memory, and ultimately history. This is one of the oldest and most enduringly present themes of art that Elsner and Wittwer address. Their pieces draw from the paintings of the old masters or from films or archival photographs, updating their meanings within a compelling iconography. The works in the exhibition are not simply a commentary on the present reality and do not have the ability to change it, instead they are able to arouse empathy towards tragic fates.

The exhibition has an underlying idea that life unfolds between the forgetting necessary for daily activities, and the remembering that is needed to avoid past mistakes. While we are vulnerable to the past, the intimate power of art is to store empathetic memory especially at this time when the future is plunging into increasingly disturbing uncertainty.