Smooth/Rough by Krzysztof Leon Dziemaszkiewicz is a performance inspired by the work of Joseph Beuys – an artist who has remained an important and compelling point of reference throughout Dziemaszkiewicz’s artistic practice. Yet Beuys has always existed more as a legend than as a direct model. Rather than attempting to reconstruct or reproduce his practice, the performance constitutes a personal encounter with its legacy, viewed from the perspective of the present day.
Of particular significance is Beuys’s German heritage and his experience of the Second World War. This history forms an important underlying context for the work, but is never narrated explicitly. Instead, it resurfaces through materials, gestures, and the physical presence of the performer.
At the heart of the performance are materials deeply embedded in Beuys’s practice – fat, honey, and felt – brought into dialogue with organic substances characteristic of Dziemaszkiewicz’s own work, such as earth, peat, and straw. Here, matter is neither decorative nor merely symbolic. It is an active substance, subject to deformation, disintegration, displacement, and transformation. Its physical properties – viscosity, temperature, weight, texture, fragility, and resistance – become the basis of the action and, at the same time, a means of inquiry.
The opposition between the “smooth” and the “rough” invoked by the title extends beyond the qualities of a surface. It articulates a broader constellation of tensions that structures the performance: between tenderness and violence, fluidity and resistance, control and the loss of control, protection and destruction, memory and the present. The performance employs the language of matter to speak of the world we inhabit – its tensions, crises, transformations, and profound instability.
Smooth/Rough is therefore less a tribute to Beuys than an encounter between two artistic practices separated by time, historical experience, and distinct performative strategies. Dziemaszkiewicz treats Beuys’s legacy as material for his own practice: subjecting it to a physical trial, dismantling its symbols, and bringing them into the realm of his own corporeality. What emerges is a performance in which matter becomes a vessel for memory, the body a tool of analysis, and destruction a method of inquiry.
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