Abstract
Dorota Sajewska ponders the significance of the actor/performer's body in art which aims to mediate the experiences of the second and third generation after the Holocaust. Referencing such performance theorists as Peggy Phelan, José Esteban Muñoz, Rebecca Schneider, and Diana Taylor, she calls attention to the marginalization of work with the body in Western culture, which led to the removal of the body from the archive, and simultaneously from the field of impact on historical narrative and identity politics. Analyzing selected examples of contemporary practices in art (Bożena Keff, Artur Żmijewski, Theater Ramba Zamba), Sajewska demonstrates how, in evading controlled forms of recording and storing history and preserving what is marginal in a culture, the body stresses the partiality, frailty, and fragmentariness of memory and the relative nature of the historical narratives constructed on its basis.
Sajewska, Dorota