I've Seen My Death is a multimedia installation about the experience of absence.

Zuzanna Janin's project attempts to address the most universal questions facing humanity. What does it mean when someone passes away? What are the consequences? What traces are left behind by someone who is here no longer? What is a world without us like? The experience of absence is fraught with paradox. While it is something people think about all their lives, it is an experience that will remain forever beyond our grasp. Art is able to overcome the paradoxes of cognition and to make the elusive accessible. Zuzanna Janin proposes to create a space in which to imagine and meditate about death – a space simulating the impossible: the experience of non-being.

In her contribution to the artistic treatment of death, Zuzanna Janin has adopted a distinct perspective: remaining personal and subjective she examines the subject in the context of contemporary sensibilities and culture. She is most interested in death as a social event, especially the way in which the deceased continues to exist in the memory of his or her loved ones. She examines the ceremonies and rituals related to the departed, showing images of death as they operate in the public imagination.

Death is analyzed as yet another topic appropriated by the media. Newspaper obituaries, video recordings, souvenir photos all make up the contemporary iconography of death which accordingly gains a new public and media dimension.

I've Seen My Death is a constellation of videos, photographs and texts constituting the image of someone who has passed away. The work's narrative is constructed from the perspective of a fictional protagonist, the artist's alter ego who is granted the impossible: a view of the world after her death. Due to the subjective nature of the narration, spectators can identify with the narrator and share in her experience.

Stach Szabłowski

Video

Film

Thanatologists find it useful to conjugate death in various persons.

The first person incarnates the "I" of the moribund who, strictly speaking, does not undergo the experience, but is literally going under in the painfully protracted process of dying.

The second person appears as the mourner, and also the murderer, in the face to face encounter Levinas described, whenever one is called upon to take responsibility for the death of another, to partake in their dying.

The third person is there to convince us that it's always others who die.

I wonder which of these persons would best correspond to Zuzanna surreptitiously attending her own staged funeral. I suspect that her gesture stemmed from a desire to disturb the irrevocable and remorseless order of death.

This disturbance worked best in the second person, for (regardless of the situation's ethical ambivalence) the unwitting mourners really did experience her death so that they could just as vividly experience her resurrection.

I was never a friend of courtly art financed by successive generations of Philistines who relish the tame and the harmonious. Much to my delight, Zuzanna's art passionately flails out against all harmony; her dominant urge is transgression. Zuzanna arouses my com-passion (that is emotional complicity) in her ongoing need to contend with the age-old ordnung of values: permanent vs. evanescent, lasting vs. fleeting, living vs. dead. When she designs (permanent) edifices of (evanescent) silk or foil, erects (lasting) statues of (fleeting) candy floss, and blends into the cortege at her own funeral Zuzanna plays out paradoxes which, in various degrees, give me a sense of the strangeness of existence.

There is no doubt in my mind that we live in an ochlocracy where complacent and unwashed rabble aspire to the "rule of souls." Philistine societies had always been particularly hard on artists; for the hostile mob state patronage of culture is merely endorsing the antics of a bevy of freeloaders. Aesthetic terror condemns the poet to rhyme and reason, composers to tonality and harmony, visual artists to mimetic craftsmanship.

I see it as my intellectual duty to oppose the primitive naming and framing of scapegoats among artists who bear the supreme creative risk. In Janin's case insult was added to injury as her work was maligned not by the bovine herd of the moral majority, but by so-called connoisseurs of contemporary art. Then suddenly a miracle came to pass when incensed and captious critics wanting to slam Zuzanna's work as a mindless and imitative farce created a palimpsest of sorts: the work's full impact is derived from the combination of critical outcry and the I've Seen My Death video footage. Only then did the artist's true intention become evident: her subject is not just the passing away of an individual but a sophisticated examination of the passing of art criticism in Poland. By purposely allowing herself to be led lamb-like to the slaughter Zuzanna has penetrated and mercilessly diagnosed the appalling bias towards contemporary art and the insensibility of its supposed addressees.

Art critics seek to learn what was in the coffin. It is as if they were afraid of finding their own cadaver inside.

Wojciech Kuczok, luty 2004