Marker

Jacek Malinowski’s Marker is a fictitious story of an anarchist who belongs to an informal collective called The Markers. In this video triptych, the artist constructs the figure of the protagonist – a young British man lost in the world of global capitalism. In the first part of the video, Malinowski sketches his psychological portrait; in the second part, the protagonist appears at landmark locations in Warsaw. He can be seen on the Poniatowski Bridge, at the Warsaw Powiśle railway station, by the Palm Tree on the De Gaulle Roundabout. Everywhere he goes, be it secluded nooks or Warsaw’s most central locations, he urinates.

Marker perceives reality as a fiction based on manipulation and a race for money. He gives vent to his aggression in the third part of the video: “I don’t understand the system, it cheats me,” he says. In a world divided into “winners” and “losers,” he belongs to the misfits. He sees contemporary civilisation as a self-annihilating organism whose existence is nearing the inevitable end: “The future is the past.” However, consistent as he is, the character contains a multitude of contradictions. He rejects globalisation and corporate power and yet he dines at a McDonald’s. He admits that his radical views are not paralleled by his actions. “Pissing” on the world, an expression of one’s failure to fit into reality, is an impotent gesture. Malinowski’s work is a study in mounting frustration. At the end of parts two and three, Marker puts on a balaclava, which may suggest a move from passivity to acts of terror.

The artist described work on the video as “juggling with truths and appearances… in order to conjure up probability out of fictitious elements or fictions out of truths.” Interested in the format of “false documentary,” Malinowski builds up fictions with precision but never stops undermining them. For Malinowski, the fiction is not an end in itself; it is a means of constructing an authentic image of reality. The key point in the videos comes when the lie becomes apparent, arousing uncertainty about what we have really seen so far.

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translated from Polish by Marcin Łakomski