Robert Kuśmirowski, Liberum Animum, 2017, installation
Robert Kuśmirowski’s installation is a room of a fictitious character – a craftsman, a petty manufacturer, but also a contemporary madman, hoarder, someone who obsessively collects objects to an abnormal degree. The Latin expression liberum animum means free mind, and indicates how the idea of this strange interior should be perceived. At the same time, we see a symptom of obsessive hoarding, which has gone far beyond innocent sentimentalism and turned into a dangerous obsession. Old toys, knick-knackery, objects discarded years ago create an oversaturated claustrophobic space, which is filled by the mind that knows no borders or restraint. Yet, if we take a closer look at the interior, we can see that it mainly comprises increasingly precise images of faces; there are photographs of mutilated soldiers, ethnic masks, heads of mannequins and dolls – deformed representations of the human mirror reflection, disfigured and terrifying. An incomplete, or hybrid, face has been multiplied and densely fills the place, whose disturbing form turns it into a space suspended between the human and the already non-human micro-world.
