Paper short abstract:

In this paper I would like to discuss the ephemeral collection of assemblages and photographs called '4 x Pieróg', exhibited in the Regional Museum of Siedlce in Poland in 1993.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I would like to discuss the 'collective portrait' made through a collaborative project between artists from the Laboratory of Creative Education, Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw together with the Jubilee Arts from Britain in collaboration and participation of the villagers of Pieróg in central Poland. The idea was to replace their 'image' created by outsiders with a 'self-portrait'. The series of images were then returned back to the local community. The exhibition was meant to change the ways in which people from rural areas of Poland were usually perceived and presented.

Alfred Gell argues that we approach art objects like people as if they had 'physiognomies'. Physiognomies trigger emotive responses and affect the recipients in various ways. However, art objects also do something else: they give access to 'another mind', which, according to Husserl, is a series of perceptual/memory images. We therefore approach art objects as if they were 'social others'. For my doctoral research I looked further at the memory of the artistic event. In this paper I explore further some of my research findings by analyzing both the memories of people and the archival reviews of the exhibition '4 x Pieróg', in order to explore its efficacy and its potential to trigger emotive responses.