Anna Baumgart – l’étrangère

Anna Baumgart’s film project was created for the exhibition at the Art Centre in Falstad, Norway – location of a German concentration camp during the Second World War. Mostly Russians, Serbs and Poles were detained there. Baumgart’s film merges the style of a documentary, para-theatrical staging and a record of Hellinger’s Constellations.

The video Fresh Cherries pertains primarily to the phenomenon of stigmatisation and hierarchisation of the victims of the Second World War, which shapes the image of the war in the eyes of the younger generation. The tabooisation of prostitution at concentration camps as forced labour is based primarily on the common conviction concerning the “voluntary” character of the choice of women recruited to Sonderbau (the camp public house, also known as “puff”). In the post-war discourse, discrimination of women forced to become prostitutes was common and consisted in depriving them of the victim status. The suffering of those women did not come to an end the moment the camp was liberated – in many cases they were completely “eradicated” from common consciousness. From a broader perspective, Baumgart’s work also pertains to the phenomenon of trauma and ways of dealing with it.

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See the video on the Warsaw's Museum of modern art website

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Fresh Cherries

Anna BaumgartFresh Cherries2010still from the film

Born in 1966 in Wrocław, Poland, Anna Baumgart is a multimedia artist who represents a feminist perspective focused on personal, often hidden, problems and obsessions, also delving into the subject of the “Other”. She works in video, installation, performance, sculpture, and artistic tattoo.

In 1994 Baumgart graduated from the department of sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. In 1995 she received the Award of the City of Gdańsk for the Most Interesting Debut. In the 1990s she collaborated with the most important centers of the Polish artistic scene: Wyspa Gallery, Spichż 7 Gallery, Baltic Cultural Center and CCA Łaźnia. Baumgart has taken part in the most important shows of Polish art at home and abroad. In 2004 Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw organised her exhibition in tandem with Birgit Brenner. She has received stipends from Fundacja Kultury (2001) and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2005). She was awarded the First Prize at LOOP festival in Barcelona in 2011 for her video Fresh Cherries. Baumgart’s works are in the collections of Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Lublin, Museum of Art in Frankfurt a/M, and in private collections.

Click to download the artist’s CV

Dominik Czechowski, There is nothing less certain than the past, Postmedium

Bill Kouwenhoven ,The Uncanny and the Hypothetical in the Work of Anna Baumgart

Décalages, ParisArt,

Anna Baumgart Terytorium Komanczów / gazeta towarzysząca wystawie

Sprawa kobieca według Anny Baumgart, Dziennik Teatralny

ITS OWN KIND OF TRUTH, BY JÖRG HEISER

Anna Baumgart and Her Historiography Art, Contemporary Lynx

Responsibility for the Story, by Katarzyna Bojarska

Postcards from Warsaw, Frieze

Culture.pl

REVOLUTION IS NOT A DINNER. THOUGH MAYBE?, Performance, BWA Bydgoszcz, Poland, 2019