kardynal (cardinal)

The video installation kardynal (cardinal) presents a performance that the Polish artist Paweł Althamer conducted as a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. As a part of a project in the Department of Sculpture, students were assigned the task of replicating the liturgical garb of a cardinal. Althamer conceived a performance in which, through a self-experiment, he engaged with the staging of religious rites as well as practices of self-immersion and self-renunciation. The setting was a tin washtub filled with water and purple papier-mâché that the artist placed on a wooden stage he set up in a classroom. Over the course of the more than thirty-minute performance accompanied by religious music, Alhamer got into the tub, smoked joints, and communicated while intoxicated with the audience. The action has anarchic aspects, which turn a church dignitary into a target of ridicule and irony.