Pride and Shamelessness: A Discussion with Monika Borys and Przemysław Sadura

Performances by folk theater groups serve as a space for negotiating social hierarchies, aspirations, and a sense of belonging. Depictions of everyday life influence who is granted recognition and whose way of life becomes the subject of judgment or shame.

 

During the event, we will bring together three perspectives: the paintings of Edward Dwurnik, Monika Borys’s analysis of popular culture, and research on social emotions co-led by Przemysław Sadura. The exhibition “Edward Dwurnik: Pride and Shame” interprets the artist’s work through the lens of social advancement and class transformation. The series Athletes and Workers depict people’s everyday lives, their aspirations, weaknesses, and struggle for recognition. Dwurnik treated painting as a language that enabled him to connect with the people he portrayed. The combination of commitment and irony in his works allows us to examine the tension between solidarity with the subjects of the paintings and subjecting them to judgment.

 

In Shameless Images, Monika Borys analyzes representations of the working classes in Polish popular culture after 1989—from disco polo and The World According to the Kiepski Family to Patryk Vega’s films and pathostreams. She shows how aesthetic judgments intertwine with the evaluation of people, and how the mass circulation of images disrupts the intellectual hierarchies of taste. Visibility, however, can both strengthen subjectivity and reinforce stereotypes.

 

The report Shameless People by Przemysław Sadura, Julia Szostek, and Michał Sutowski shifts the focus to the political consequences of threatened pride and shame. The authors describe the mechanism of transferring shame to other groups and situations in which shaming strengthens solidarity with those targeted.

 

These three perspectives will allow us to examine the connections between image and social position: the right to representation, the consequences of ridicule, and the possibilities for rejecting imposed judgments.

 

NN6T is a partner of this event.