Hubert Czerepok
Playoff
In Playoff, Czerepok uses found footage from an amateur video found online, a recording of an arranged a fight between hooligans. The video was of very poor quality, with fuzzy, pixelated, and overlapping images. The artist’s intervention consisted in adding a black background and outlining the fighting characters with white. As a result, the video resembles a cartoon.
Such fights and aggression are phenomena that have not been eliminated for years. Through his work, the artist points to the availability of violent materials on social media that can be easily viewed by children. He also shows the spread of violence as a social problem, reaching far wider that the football hooligan community.
Hubert Czerepok is the author of films, photographs, objects, and installations. In 1999, he graduated in drawing and sculpture from the University of Arts in Poznań. He also studied at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp. Currently, he is an associate professor at the Faculty of Painting and New Media of the Academy of Art in Szczecin and the head of Experimental Film Studio.
In his work, Czerepok uses visual materials taken primarily from television and the Internet (as well as from books), transforming and placing them in a new context. Staging various types of social situations, he analyses human behaviour. He scrutinizes the functioning of cultural institutions, such as a museum or a library, questions their functionality, and undermines their usefulness, changing them for example, into leisure centres. Czerepok is also interested in unusual phenomena and examines anomalies, and strange and out of control even with a sense of humour.