A performer, author of installations, objects, photographs, and drawings. Born in Łódź in 1973, Robert Kuśmirowski studied at the Faculty of Art of the Institute of Fine Arts at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin from 1998 to 2003, where he graduated from the Monumental Sculpture Studio of Professor Sławomir Andrzej Mieleszko. During the 2002-2003 academic year, he was a scholarship student at the Metal and Modeling Studio at the University of Rennes 2 and Beaux-Arts Rennes. He is associated with the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw, the Johnen Galerie in Berlin, and Guido Costa Projects in Turin. He is a recipient of the Polityka Passport Award and the Annual Award of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in the field of Visual Arts for 2011, as well as numerous other awards. He lives and works in Lublin. Since 2007, he has been employed at his alma mater, the Institute of Fine Arts of the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, in the Department of Intermedia. Most of his works are based on the reconstruction and copying of old objects, documents, and photographs, as well as creating deceptively similar imitations. These usually lack a specific original, but merely evoke the material culture of a particular era. However, they are always characterized by obsessive precision and meticulousness. The artist’s passion for collecting also emerges in his larger installations – the accumulated objects then create difficult-to-grasp collections, described by Joanna Mytkowska as “a baroque of excess and an entropy of detail.” In this way, Kuśmirowski evokes memory, history, and the nostalgia that accompanies the visual culture of the distant and more recent past, slowly disappearing beneath successive layers. This also reveals a vanitas theme in his works – recreating bygone material culture becomes a way of addressing themes of transience, transience, and death. His actions and performances, sometimes complemented by music he himself composes, also have a similar character.
Contemporary art in public spaces, particularly those marked by trauma and collective memory, today finds itself at the intersection between aesthetics and ethics. An artistic installation in the form of a telescope, directed toward the site of the former German Nazi concentration camp KL Majdanek in Lublin, fits into this precisely defined area of discourse. The installation, seemingly simple in form, engages the viewer in an intense and multi-layered manner, balancing on the edge of documentary coldness and affective intervention.
The Image of Death from a Distance
The telescope – an observation tool used in landscape parks, viewpoints, and tourist destinations – is here transported into the realities of the 20th century’s criminal legacy. The viewer stands before the telescope, placed at the Majdanek fence, on the edge of a city that has lived for decades in the shadow of its unnamed topography. What is usually used for contemplating nature or the panorama is used for a different kind of “view”: a close-up image of the infrastructure of systemic genocide. The moment the viewer’s eye merges with the telescope’s optics, a mechanism of symbolic identification is activated. On the one hand, we become observers of history, our gaze focused on the precision of the camp layout: parallel barracks, crematoria, watchtowers, barbed wire, transport routes. On the other hand, it is poignant to realize that similar tools were used by the Nazis: guards, SS officers, and the camp commandant himself. The telescope thus becomes not only an “eye of history” but also a device that allows us to experience a moment of terrifying empathy – entering the perspective of the perpetrator.
Aesthetics of Plan and Crime
Situated in this way, the work explores the tension between visual order and moral chaos. The camp infrastructure, designed with military precision, reveals itself as an aesthetic construct – functional, rational, almost modernist. It is precisely this “aesthetics of crime” that evokes the greatest anxiety. Viewed through a telescope, the camp ceases to be an abstract historical icon and becomes a real machinery of death, inscribed into Lublin’s topography like any other urban architectural complex. This simultaneous proximity and distance—the ability to observe the camp from a distance, yet zoomed in—creates an unusual cognitive tension. The telescope does not offer the comfort of narrative, nor does it guide the viewer like a traditional museum exhibition. Instead, it allows one to “enter” a view, seemingly neutral, yet emotionally and morally charged. This disruption of distance creates new possibilities for processing trauma.
Contemporary research on collective memory (Aleida Assmann, Marianne Hirsch) emphasizes the importance of so-called postmemory – the ways in which successive generations experience a past they did not live through, but which they inherit. In this context, the work LICHTUNG II becomes a medium of postmemory – the telescope not so much enables the reconstruction of facts as it triggers ethical imagination. The experience of the work is not about providing knowledge but about provoking affect. Looking through the telescope is intended to evoke a shiver and a mental rainstorm. This experience stems from the dissonance between the aesthetics of the image and its historical significance. In this sense, my artistic work aligns with the work of artists such as Alfredo Jaar, Christian Boltanski, and Jochen Gerz – who employ “sparse form” to elicit the viewer’s profound experience.
Art and the Space of Memory
In the context of the OPEN CITY exhibition, which places contemporary art in the urban space of Lublin, this type of work becomes particularly significant. Not only because Majdanek is a special place—at once a museum, cemetery, educational site, and monument—but also because, through this work, artists and viewers are invited to reconsider the city’s relationship with its traumatic legacy. On the one hand, Majdanek is increasingly “growing” into the urban fabric, becoming almost a natural park, the everyday backdrop to Lublin’s life. On the other hand, LICHTUNG II disrupts this phenomenon of normalization. It forces us to pause, to take a fresh look—not so much with respect or reflection, but with cognitive anxiety. This is art that creates an effect of close-up vision that is impossible to forget.
– Robert Kuśmirowski (Lublin, 18.07.2025)
