video still
video still
DIVINE ASSISTANCE
2025, performance with interactive video installation by Zbigniew Bzymek, duration: 20 min
2025.06 AA - anonimowi artyści (AA - Artists Anonymous);
curated by: Nikita Krzyżanowska, Mirosław Chudy
Port Miejski we Wrocławiu, Poland
Suspended in a safety harness, the artist employs the body as both instrument and site of transgression, expelling vegan dyes — prepared by the artist as medium
and residue — from the rectum onto a canvas below. The gesture collapses the boundaries between purification and defilement, drawing on Kristeva’s theorisation of the abject: that which is violently cast out from the body and from social order. Excretion is here reframed as a generative mark-making act; the resulting canvas serves as relic and testament to a body pushed beyond the limits of aesthetic propriety.
What emerges, however, is a paradoxical elegance. The performance unfolds as a rigorously composed choreography — abject gestures rendered with precision and restraint, transfigured into a controlled, almost ceremonial act. The resulting image
is not incidental but cultivated: the product of days of cleansing, calibration, and bodily preparation. Positioned between discipline and surrender, refinement and expulsion, the work repositions the rectum as simply another bodily instrument — one demanding dexterity and attentiveness — as it seeks pathways toward inhabiting the self more fully, beyond inherited preconceptions and regimes of exclusion.
Divine Assistance, squirt painting on canvas, 210 x 300 cm