Small spectacles – iguana

Dominik Lejman’s film documents the project Little Spectacles carried out in the Children’s Clinical Hospital in Białystok and referring to the enterprise entitled Art in Hospital in Europe, in which the artist participated. Besides Białystok, Lejman’s video-frescoes of colourful exotic creatures broadcast from a projector onto the walls and flooring of hospital wards were shown in several other places, including Cleveland, New York and Warsaw. These works certainly helped their recipients, the young patients of paediatric hospitals, to domesticate and cheer up the unfamiliar space. The broadcastings were accompanied by workshops, in the process of which the children drew animals appearing in various places, this creating their own, slightly friendlier topography of the clinic, as well as defining anew their relationship to the hospital rooms and corridors, and to animals.

The recording used in Little Spectacles was made in winter in the zoological garden. Lejman’s approach to a video-recording is as minimalist and ascetic as possible; there is no attempt at  ordering or interpreting the obtained material. The image takes on its proper meaning only through the process of decontextualisation. The filmed animals were placed in a context  which is new and altogether not appropriate to them. Yet, in the case of flamingoes, iguanas or tigers, the space to which they were transferred carried similar meanings as the space in which they had been filmed. A zoological garden and a hospital have much in common; they are tightly controlled spaces with limited access; they are places of investigation and observation. The animals and patients are, respectively, in the state of captivity/containment and restraint/confinement. In the winter, exotic birds and wild cats in the zoo live in spaces of a few dozen square metres, which is similar to the area of a typical hospital corridor.

Even though Lejman’s video-frescoes seem to be of a distinct decorative value, they are not  decorations. The animals transferred to hospital spaces are nearly life-size. The effect of the recording is particularly strong because, when the contexts of the zoo and the clinic are superimposed, new meanings emerge. The presence of animals in hospital space distorts ordinary routines and questions familiar patterns of thought, demonstrating that something is not the way it should be. Again, art is shown to be an effective tool for the criticism of reality and – in the case of Little Spectacles, perhaps most importantly – it proves an excellent therapeutic medium.

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translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz