Anna Jermolaewa

Number Two (after Solomon Asch), neon sculpture, 2 watercolors, 2015
Both White (after Valeria Mukhina), wood sculpture, 2015

Installationsansicht from: Anna Jermolaewa, Good Times, Bad Times, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland / Foto: Anna Jermolaewa

These two newly developed works are dealing with the conformity experiments that were designed in the 1950s by Solomon Eliot Asch, an American Gestalt psychologist of Polish origin and the expansion of his research by Soviet psychologist Valeria Mukhina. Their main finding was that group pressure can change opinion, of even obvious facts. The participant could thus either ignore the majority and go with his own senses or he could go along with the majority and ignore the clearly obvious fact. The aim was to see whether the real participant would change his answer and respond the same way as the confederates or stick with the clearly obvious answer.