Robota (2018)

In Robota, Verena Blok highlights the machinic power of the muscular, hyper-masculine body in motion, and draws attention to its former idealization and eroticization in Soviet propaganda. The artist reveals how, in Poland, a climate of precarity and economic hardship has allowed xenophobic rhetoric to fill the void created by the decline of socialist ideology. Recording herself in conversation with the men, Blok shows how they simultaneously propagate and suffer from prejudice, and gravitate toward the same nativist policies that limit their own freedoms.