Robert Kusmirowski

Using scavenged materials, Robert Kusmirowski creates unsettling replicas of historical scenes that probe ideas of history and memory. For Doorama (2009), Kusmirowski recreated 19th-century Swedish cosmoramas, presented alongside an ornately painted door through which two eyeholes reveal a voyeuristic view of a replica street scene in Lublin, Poland. His site-specific installation Bunker (2009) transformed a gallery space into a WWII bunker, complete with chicken wire, tin cans, typewriters, rotting wooden cabinets, and a functional train track, which he used to move building materials through the space. Kusmirowski’s work expresses his complex relationship with his impoverished upbringing in Cold War-era Poland. He has related his fetishistic fervor for copying to his childhood desire to make replicas of the toys he saw in storefront windows but couldn’t afford. His works have been compared to those of Joseph Beuys.