Belina — A Man of Many Talents

Ever since his first appearances on the art scenes of his native Skierniewice, Łódź and later Warsaw, Sławomir Belina has delighted in assuming different roles. In the biographical notes accompanying exhibitions of his work since the mid-1990s, he has presented himself as a photographer, knitter, playwright, author of numerous handbooks, editor of an ultra-feminist quarterly, embroiderer, actor cast in the leading female role (the Queen of Human Hearts), poet, singer and thus occupier of human sensibility, eternal wanderer with an overdeveloped gland of contempt, fish breeder, veal enthusiast, family animal trainer… Amusingly, excerpts from this list have been quoted in all seriousness by some newspaper reviewers of the artist’s appearances.

One might ask who Mr Belina really is. We know — if we have seen his exhibitions — that he is an artist who works with photography and creates sculptural installations and videos. We know that he is a master of wordplay, and that the titles of his exhibitions and works are integral to them. We know that he very often appears as the protagonist of his works, although he is not always their author. The rest depends on the viewer’s sense of humour, their willingness to follow the threads constructed by the artist and to look beneath the mask behind which he has chosen to hide at a particular moment. (To this day, for example, I still wonder whether, during a 1998 sculpture plein-air at the Hermann Brachert Museum in Otradnoye near Kaliningrad — which I helped to organise — the artist really did create a classical sculpture of a krasavitsa, or beauty, riding a donkey, or whether it was yet another of his mystifications.)

Belina’s artistic biography is not conventional. He did not graduate from an academy of fine arts; he never even felt the need to attend one. Literature, philosophy, the clothing of thoughts in words and the freedom to combine poetry with the language of banality are as important to him as the visual arts. The extraordinarily vibrant Łódź art scene of the 1990s, with its post-Dada approach to artistic creation, shaped him as an artist. His professional flirtation with the worlds of popular culture and fashion became another source of inspiration. Above all, however, Sławomir Belina’s work is an ironic, metaphorical and grotesque story about himself as a human being and an artist. An obsessive inquiry into identity and the elements that constitute it is the most important and enduring feature of his works, with Mr Belina serving as both object/material and subject. The local context — the place in which he happened to live and work — also nourished his art. Provincial attitudes, the weight of traditional social structures and a naive yet oppressive religiosity have repeatedly been reflected in his work.

Belina is often described as a provocateur who uncompromisingly examines the limits of sincerity in self-portraiture, or as a voyeur spying on himself. Magda Ujma once aptly called him “a victim of himself”. More recently, interpretations of his work in the context of gay art have also appeared. This is an important voice. Equally significant to Belina may be his juggling of images from different levels of visual reality — high art, popular culture and socially marginalised or condemned, because supposedly obscene, realms — as well as his blurring of generic boundaries and laying of false trails. Belina’s provocations are never simple. They are elaborate constructions in which (self-)irony is carried to the point of cruelty, while wit and grotesque play crucial roles, simultaneously blocking overly unequivocal interpretations. The artist frequently revisits motifs from earlier works, building stories in successive projects through subconscious, instinctive associations.

Norma is Sławomir Belina’s latest project, a video installation made especially for the exhibition at Atlas Sztuki in Łódź. After many years, the artist returns to a city important to him; he returns with an exhibition made using a technique new to his practice, and he returns to art after a period devoted to journalism. When I asked what had inspired the project, he quoted a contemporary writer (sic!) on “the desire to escape into some alternative life that would not be his own”. Once again, this desire impelled the artist to embody different figures and to seek or affirm himself by donning ever new costumes. Belina borrowed the work’s title from Vincenzo Bellini’s forgotten 1831 opera Norma, a bootleg recording of which recently came into his possession. The installation’s somewhat grotesque pathos, theatrical gestures and extravagant costumes are likewise quasi-operatic in origin. Another source of inspiration is the fashion world and the visual conventions it dictates, including costume design and fashion photography. We might also detect references to the recently popular — and overused — strategy of “art in urban space”, in which the performer’s body is inserted into the rhythm of a city’s daily life. The artist is also interested in analysing movement in performance, somewhere between dance and gymnastics. Norma is an adventure-project that allowed its creator to try his hand at haute couture — designing experimental hybrid costumes, at times incorporating mechanical elements, in collaboration with celebrated Łódź tailors and constructors — and to select music for the film’s “dance” sequences. It also gave him the opportunity to discover iconic cities on four continents: Venice, New York, Hanoi and Cairo. The result is a syncretic and atmospheric work in which the “artificial”, fifth (?) element — Mr Belina dressed in theatrical, futuristic costumes — performs an enigmatic dance amid the banal bustle of cities belonging to different cultures.

Might this be an ironic comment on the difficult position of the contemporary artist in society?

Magda Kardasz, born in 1967, is a curator of contemporary art. She works at Zachęta National Gallery of Art.