As part of Polska! Year in the UK, Robert Kusmirowski has undertaken his first UK show, entitled Bunker. The Lodz-born artist has created an installation based upon a World War Two-era bunker that transforms the Barbican’s Curve gallery into a new territory. The bunker is littered with artefacts and objects that lie rusted, distorted and unexplained. The spaces encountered in the bunker remain eerily silent as the voids soar into the unseen gloom. Each room has the remnants of human inhabitation, and has traces of processes and rituals carried out by long-gone hands.
The installation follows a small rail track, rusted and disused. Debris and dust cover the floor; the walls are adorned with rusting pipes and shambolic electrical boxes. Each room has been laid out denoting a purpose: a sleeping quarters, an office, a control room and a storeroom. The artefacts that litter the rooms try to evoke a sense of inhabitation. The pieces have been meticulously collected by Kusmirowski over the years and modified to mimic the effects of ageing and decay.
The installation is both a continuation of, and a departure from, Kusmirowki’s previous work. ‘Double V’ (2003), for example, was a reconstruction of a 1970’s communist era worker’s flat, complete with recognisable objects of the period such as old tools, photographs and a portrait of Lenin. ‘Wagon’ (2006) was a painstaking reconstruction of a 1940’s rail carriage that bore an emotive resemblance to the units used to transport detainees to concentration camps. Drawing on his own knowledge and an ingrained understanding of the emotional resonance of these installations, Kusmirowski created poignant and interesting works that placed history in the context of objects.
Rather than a meticulous reconstruction of a specific scene, Bunker is more an accumulation of disparate, albeit historically authentic, objects that have been arranged in the hope that they can provide a starting point for a narrative. The installation draws on its obvious setting – the Barbican exists because German bombs decimated the land it sits on during the war – while a newspaper lies on the desk from 1940 as a direct reminder. With no particular story to tell, however, the installation lacks direction: it does not evoke the horror of the blitz, or provide enough context for the visitor to imagine their own story. It suffers in comparison with the work of Thomas Demand’s – whose reconstructions in paper and card revisit particular historic events and scenarios that have powerful stories behind them – or that of Mike Nelson, whose work tends to have a powerful narrative and visual drama. In particular Kusmirowski’s latest work lacks the consistency to be genuinely evocative: certain pieces lie mangled (apparently damaged or shattered by a bomb blast) whilst adjacent items lie almost pristine. Unfortunately, the imagery does not quite add up.
Bunker by Robert Kusmirowski is on at the Barbican Curve Gallery, EC2, until 10 January
