Zbigniew Libera is concerned with the patterns of mass culture, methods of education and the manipulation of the perception of reality by the media. The sculpture Placebo (1995), presented in the artist’s solo exhibition at Zachęta in 2009, consists of 71 packages of a medication containing pure suppository mass. Libera ordered 550 packets of this product from a pharmaceutical factory. The packets look like real drugs, but a placebo is an inert substance that is designed to work by suggestion. The work ironically refers to the manipulation of the collective consciousness by the media and advertising. As Piotr Rypson wrote, Placebo is ‘a pseudo-product of the pharmacological empire of cures for everything: blood pressure, melancholy, psychedelic opening of the doors of perception’.