A Landscape for Little Spectacles

Artists Dominik Lejman
Genre Video
Edition Survival 12

The video featured at SURVIVAL documented Lejman’s installation titled Landscape for Little Spectacles. Projections showing wild animals were screened in pediatric wards in hospitals in Warsaw (2002), Białystok (2003) and New York (2004), where the work is on permanent display. The video documentation showed the young patients’ interest and their lively responses to images of wild animals stampeding across walls or beds. The colourful projections turned the austere spaces of the hospitals into a fascinating exotic world, inhabited by flamingoes, turtles and tigers. Lejman’s project focused on the therapeutic potential of art. The pictures stimulated the imagination and offered an invitation to an alternative world, which helped the children to forget about their diseases. The sheer pleasure of watching and discovering made it possible to marginalise the dominant context for a brief moment while art’s escapist dimension brought relief.

> Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz

 

photo: Peter Kreibich