Fortynine
Rafal Kosakowski created an identity including a limited book and DVD edition for Michal Kosakowski’s art installation Fortynine—49 short movies on the subject of killing.
Visitors who enter the 5 × 4 × 3 meter mirror-walled cube are confronted by a 49-part HD split screen that mirrors their reflections to infinity. The fact of interpersonal acts of violence, here anchored in present-day aesthetics, is also reflected in the emotions visible on the faces of the visitors, which are equally mirrored to infinity. 49 examples of fictitious killing collide head-on with the real emotions of the installation’s visitors. The collective experience of any emotion generates intimacy—and it is precisely this intimacy that acts as a further constitutive component of Fortynine: the confrontation of the individual with itself, in the face of the most atrocious examples of violence. What Michal Kosakowski grants us is the rare occasion to experience a genuine taboo of our times and our Western society—death. A death that, for the time being, seems to present itself exclusively in the contemporary guise of the incessant violence staged by the media.
