Polish artist Artur Zmijewski has assembled a collection of dolls, or rather, screenshots of dolls posted for sale on ebay. Considering the images as “found footage” from an imagined macabre cinema, Zmijewski is fascinated by how most of the truly devastated, and shattered ones, and those posed in perverted ways, come from the US.
The artist wonders: “Were they heavily used? Do they come from kids living in terrible poverty? Or maybe just from the trash? Why do these sellers offer them in such a condition – sometimes fragmented, cracked and so on? I’m not a sociologist…I would propose the title “Made in USA.”
And yet, the visceral sensation from these artifacts take us far away from the continued prosperity of the US. They feel like snapshots from the horrors of Ukraine or Gaza—horrors which are certainly not disconnected from the USA. But as the political ground shifts here, one wonders if they are nightmare or premonition. -Noah Fischer
