'Letter from Warsaw'
Recenzja Phoebe Blatton w magazynie Art Monthly

Zapraszamy do lektury recenzji opublikowanej w magazynie Art Monthly w listopadzie 2020 r., a dotyczacej wystawy towarzyszącej festiwalowi WARSZAWA W W BUDOWIE XII. Tekst autorstwa Phoebe Blatton publikujemy dzięki uprzejmości autorki w oryginale, w języku angielskim:

Letter from Warsaw

‘You have a Polish passport, but you don’t speak Polish?’ I try to answer – in bad Polish – that I grew up in the UK. The officer at the Bureau of Civic Affairs in Warsaw shakes his head. We can’t really hear each other through our facemasks and the plastic screen between us. I’m applying for an ID card, which should make living in the EU easier when the realities of Brexit kick in.

My photo ‘does not comply’ because my fringe has infringed my eyebrows, so I’m sent off to a nearby photographic studio. I glance at portraits of cats and dogs populating the walls of the ersatz log cabin interior of the photobooth. ‘My dead pets,’ the woman says, urging me to push back my hair and look straight ahead. I return with the new photo. The officer is satisfied and my papers are stamped, and I’m told to return in a few weeks to collect my card.

Ascending the bridge that leads onto aleje Jerozolimskie with traffic hurtling past, a sensation of vertigo is exacerbated when I come face to face with a sculpture of Pope John Paul II, standing in a ‘pool of blood’ and about to hurl a meteorite. Presently installed outside the National Museum, Jerzy Kalina’s Poisoned Well, 2020, mimics Maurizio Cattelan’s La Nona Ora, 1999. Cattelan’s infamous stricken Pope was installed at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw in 2000, and further stricken when two horrified Catholic members of the Polish parliament tried to get him back onto his feet. Poisoned Well is a similarly awkward response, as it is inadvertently, possibly the most anti-Catholic work of art ever made. Modelled with exceptional vulgarity, JP resembles a deranged, sickly Golum which seems to be having a really heavy period, becoming so hysterical that someone has called the cops; a uniformed security guard prowls around the installation, as if glaring signs about CCTV surveillance weren’t enough. From this perspective, Cattelan’s Pope seems by comparison flooded with grace.

Meanwhile, the annual Warsaw Gallery Weekend has begun its 10th edition just as Covid-19 infections in Poland, and the rest of Europe, surge. With reports of a ‘super spreader’ infecting 300 people at a dinner during Berlin Art Week, I’m not exactly champing at my facemask to get stuck in, though I’m thirsty for a more edifying artistic experience.

I head to the Museum of Modern Art for the opening of the Warsaw Under Construction Festival, which traditionally focuses on urban design in its broadest sense. This year’s iteration doesn’t shy from the moment – both in terms of the pandemic and in the local, political sense as Poland’s ultra-conservative forces march forth. Hoping to ‘shift emphasis from the streets and squares of Warsaw to issues of social relations’, the festival’s programme, including a series of educational workshops by Black is Polish, the Afro-Polish activists behind the campaign #DontCallMeMurzyn (a term often used as a racial slur), invites a seemingly riven society to try and find, to quote the exhibition’s title, ‘something in common’.

I think of a story recently reported in the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza about a woman who was terrorised by her landlord and neighbours for hanging a rainbow flag from her balcony in Warsaw. It epitomises the culture war over ‘LGBT ideology’, which according to President Andrzej Duda, recently re-elected by the slimmest of margins, holds the greatest threat to ‘Polish values’ since Communism. ‘We are not an ideology, but people,’ rings an essential retort as queer activists are thrown in prison, while Polish teenagers are taking their lives in record numbers and Poland is recently ranked as one of the worst places in the EU for LGBT rights. But an ‘ideology’ – a loaded word in any post-communist country – is at stake. Many LGBTQ Poles and their allies are fighting an intersectional struggle against oppression, recognising that the oppressor is a many-headed hydra: the church, unbridled capitalism, and history ever fermenting the nation’s soul. A vast spectrum of trauma is contained in the rainbow flags I spy draped from the balconies of countless postwar housing blocks, rapidly subsumed by the skyscrapers of global corporations.

I take a minute with Zuza Golińska’s Observatory, 2020. It occupies a large area of the space’s centre, suggesting a shallow, elliptic amphitheatre comprising four quarters made of recycled plywood. Tiered seating traditionally faces towards the middle, but the three steps of Golińska’s construction face outwards, taking attention away from a ‘central actor’ and redirecting it to the surroundings. The work elicits the sensation of witnessing a void, followed by the slow recognition of others sharing space with you on the periphery, cautiously distancing. It is a quietly moving work, the value of which is only made more pertinent by an announcement that we have to evacuate the building. The museum has received a warning about a possible sarin gas attack. It is soon declared a hoax, most likely the work of right-wing extremists. What can’t be underestimated in Poland is the extent to which culture is battleground.

If there’s a ‘trend’ in Polish art that keeps surfacing, I would hazard that it is one that speaks to the times we are living through, drawing on alternative forms of survival, esotericism, sensuality and theatricality. In the work of Poland’s younger artists, one can still sense a proximity to traditional craft practices. There’s a confident, post-ironic handling of materials which casually and knowingly traverses the lines in and out the digital realm. Instagram as folk practice? The analogue spirits of Maria Anto and Władysław Hasior infuse the bustling group show ‘Pandemic Dreams’ at Serce Człowieka, the domestic riot at Foksal Gallery Foundation’s ‘Wages for Housework’, featuring Paulina Ołowska, Agata Słowak, Natalia Załuska and a heavy waft of incense, and ‘Queer Queer Casimir’, a salon hosted by curator Anke Kempkes, which features Anto alongside a new generation of melancholic sorcerers. [...]

Phoebe Blatton