Collection

The film opens with a scene of a performance artist breaking into the Garden of Paradise to re-enact the sin of biblical ancestors. Hooliganism is blown up beyond proportion and into the grotesque. While Oskar Dawicki does not commit the original sin and eat the forbidden apple, he takes a bite out of each apple in the tree, spitting out the sour pulp every time. In his work, he was inspired among other things by the thought of Emil Cioran, who claimed that the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge must have been unripe. The brief philosophical treatise is a kind of apocrypha, where human curiosity and sinful temptation are confronted with dogmas of faith. As the artist explained in an interview, “This is an icon of the end, of exhaustion, of a vacuum, all of which appear in what I do in assorted configurations.”

Performance artist, draughtsman, creator of films, videos, and installations. A graduate of the Fine Arts Faculty at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and co-founder of the Azorro Supergroup. Despite his background in painting, he is primarily known as a performance artist. His oeuvre is immersed in the poetics of the absurd, the grotesque and irony, and strongly post-conceptual. Frequent motifs include reflection on the status of the artist and ponderings on transience. Dawicki claims Zbigniew Warpechowski, the doyen of performance art in Poland, as a key figure to his artistic identity. He is the protagonist of the novel W połowie puste (Half-Empty, 2011) by Łukasz Gorczyca and Łukasz Ronduda, and of a film where he plays himself, Performer (2015) by Łukasz Ronduda and Maciej Sobieszczański, and the patron of the sculpture Monument to Neurotics: Oskar’s Puddle by Rafał Bujnowski, unveiled in 2019 at Al. Ujazdowskie 4 in Warsaw. He participated in Manifesta 7 in 2008. He lives and works in Warsaw.