Zbigniew Libera deals with the analysis of clichés of mass culture, the mechanisms of education and the manipulation of the perception of reality by the media. In Intimate Rites (1984), the biographical context is significant: the artist’s mother was a nurse, and he himself had experience of caring for the sick in hospitals. The film documents over two years of the artist’s care for his dying grandmother, Regina G. We observe a close relationship with the elderly woman who looked after him when he was a child. Now the grandson struggles with the daily tasks of feeding, washing, dressing and changing her. The artist highlights not only the cruel mortality of the body, but also its separation from the power of the mind – the weakened body is no longer able to carry out the will of the mind. As Łukasz Ronduda noted, ‘The video explores both the greatest fall and the greatest triumph of the subject.’ Aging and death lead to the objectification of the body, but the carer represents love, devotion and sacrifice. Libera has found these spiritual values in the realm of existential experience. The film can also be seen as a manifestation of the ideas of ‘private art’ and ‘embarrassing art’ of the Łódź Pitch-In Culture group, with which Libera was associated: ‘The situation depicted is certainly embarrassing, distasteful and socially taboo. This private artistic act describes a scandalous, in my opinion, intimate relationship between a young man and an older woman.’ But it is also a relationship that fits into the natural cycle of generational succession.

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