Hanna Nowicka’s Scapegoat is a battered, worn-out school sports instrument. Over its leather seat, the artist has thrown a pile of flesh-coloured vulcanized rubber with a plump and sometimes smooth surface resembling human skin. It makes such a realistic impression that it is difficult to control the urge to touch it.
A scapegoat is an innocent victim who in ancient cultures accepted and carried the sins and guilt of the community while simultaneously being excluded from it. In the Judaic tradition, the priest of the temple in Jerusalem, having sprinkled its interior with the blood of the sacrificed bull and goat, selected another one to be led out into a desert or a rocky cliff and carry the guilt of all the people. The ancient Greeks, after selecting a pharmakos — typically a slave, criminal, or a cripple — chased them out of the city so that the plague or defeat would follow. Stigmatization, exclusion, witch-hunts, and hate speech as strategies of action within societies, nations, neighbourhood groups, at universities, schools, offices, and also PE classes, incessantly reproduce this old pattern.