‘Familiar Strangers’: A Powerful Exhibition about Eastern Europe at Bozar, Brussels

familiar_strangers_bozar_opening_kwadrat_.jpg, default, View of the "Familiar Strangers" exhibition, Bozar, Brussels, 14.03.2025 roku, photo: Kuba Celej/IAM

#photography & visual arts

What can a group of Polish artists in Brussels teach us about the fractures shaping our world? A new exhibition at Bozar reflects on the tensions between the centre and the peripheries, global political order and local identity, as well as between minority histories and Big History. It is a timely and necessary reminder about maintaining our faith in communities with thought and experience, even as we get deeper into an age of atomisation, deepening conflicts and escalating violence.

‘The future of Europe will be decided in Poland,’ declared Zoë Gray, Director of Exhibitions at Bozar in Brussels during the opening of the Familiar Strangers: The Eastern Europeans from a Polish Perspective. This thought, which could be trivialised by a reference to Poland’s Romantic messianism and that philosophy’s belief in a historical mission the country has been asked to undertake, reveals a different aspect here. For it is not a question of a special status, but rather of an ambiguous, demanding but at the same time uniquely insightful position that Poland has, situated on the outskirts of larger and stronger powers.

Towards a minority perspective

In the picture: lower row from the left: Jana Shostak, Mikołaj Sobczak, Zoe Gray (Director of exhibitions, Bozar), Olga Wysocka, (Director of AMI), Joanna Warsza (curator), Olga Brzezińska (Deputy director of AMI), Anton Varga (Open Group), Christophe Slagmuylder (CEO & Artistic Director, Bozar). Lower row from the left: Ngo Van Tuong, Renata Rara Kamińska, Zuzanna Hertzberg, Anamaria Pazmino, Jasmina Metwaly, Oliwia Bosomtwe, Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Janek Simon, Assaf Gruber, Jeremy Lambert (Bozar), during the opening of the "Familiar Strangers" exhibition, Bozar, Brussels, 14.03.2025, photo: Kuba Celej/IAM

After all, one can see more from the periphery than from the centre, a fact perfectly illustrated by the example of Polish culture. From its inception, it has remained in constant tension between the West and the East, and being constantly on the threshold, on the foreground or the flanks, it has learned to see itself as alien, not fitting in fully with either side of the border. Thanks to this unique perspective, it is now all of Eastern Europe – a Europe less real, fostered, pretentious, aspirational – that is today able to diagnose with greater perceptiveness the problems of the entire continent, things which Old Europe often chooses not to see.

In the humanities, this role is often played by the gaze of the Other – the one who, from a distance, sees what is usually considered the norm. The Other is like the Wanderer described by Friedrich Nietzsche in one of his parables – nowhere to be found, yet at the same time settled more or less everywhere, not finding himself in old languages and formulas, but eternally searching for new meanings and concepts. It doesn’t settle for a fixed identity, but enjoys constant change and flow.

This is also the mission accomplished by the Polish art in Familiar Strangers – by offering a minority and peripheral perspective, it allows for a deeper understanding of the majority and centre. By inviting us to listen to minority stories, it enables us to understand the construct that is History in the singular. This is why it was so important to include artists representing various minorities in Poland – Ukrainian, Belarusian, Jewish, but also queer and racial minorities – which can be interpreted as a consistent questioning of dominant perspectives.

If Europe should be viewed through the lens of its periphery, then the deepest understanding of this periphery is also offered by the periphery of the periphery. By those who constantly problematise – or whose problematisation is directly forced upon them by brutal politics, reprimands or propaganda – their own belonging and domicile, by those who cross the seemingly stable borders between cultures and nations, often revealing their arbitrariness and artificiality.

‘Familiar Strangers’: A Powerful Exhibition about Eastern Europe at Bozar, Brussels - Image Gallery

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Liquid boundaries

It should come as no surprise that what emerges from the exhibition is a different picture of Poland from the dominant messages steeped in nationalist rhetoric. For Poland was not, nor is it today, a cultural or ethnic monolith. On the contrary, in the blind spot between empires, it grew as a country whose constitutive feature was internal differentiation. Thanks to this tradition, it is easy for us to inscribe Polish history in the history of the world and vice versa – hence the aforementioned romantic dream of the universal significance of the Polish experience.

This is brilliantly documented in the exhibition, for example, by the loud project Repeat After Me II by the Ukrainian Open Group, first shown in 2024 at the Polish Pavilion during the Venice Biennale. The centrepiece of the installation is a video in which Ukrainian refugees reproduce the sounds characteristic of each method of Russian attack – an air raid, a drone, a shelling or a dropped bomb will all sound different. The soundscape of aggression depicted in the work not only follows in the long tradition of depicting the sensory inferno of war – the infamous shell shock of World War I – but more importantly shows the body as another battlefield, a membrane of memory, holding the memory of the traumatic discipline and industrial repetition of wartime attacks.

The work is complemented by microphones positioned opposite the screen, inviting the viewer to join in an eerie karaoke of hisses, hums and whistles. This gesture is directed not so much towards the audience, but towards the Ukrainian women and men speaking in the film – joining in the war chorus becomes an expression of solidarity that transcends national boundaries. In this case, this is all the more important insofar as it is another occasion after Venice when the Open Group project is functioning as a Polish project in some sense, or at least one that refers to Polishness. And perhaps this is what turns out to be the most vivid element of the work – the questioning of national divisions symbolised and legitimised by borders, pavilions and cultural (and other) institutions translates into a communal experiencing of history, in which we also find an appeal to take joint responsibility for it.

Jana Shostak at the opening of the exhibition "Familiar Strangers", Bozar, Brussels, 14.03.2025, photo: Kuba Celej/IAM

Jana Shostak’s work has a similar impact – A Minute of Shouting for Belarus is a video, but it was performed live by the artist during the exhibition’s opening. It is an activist intervention directed against not only the Lukashenko regime, but also, as the artist herself points out, against the resurgence of global fascisms, the escalation of violence, and the return of imperial rhetoric in general. Coming directly from the artist’s experience, in her hands the action becomes an instrument of opposition devoid of any epithets, a fundamental and generalised disagreement, expressed in the simplest, but also the most blunt, of forms.

Saving universality

And this is also where the exhibition’s most interesting, and undoubtedly most central question arises – the question about the possibility of a universal imagination. The belief in the universality of the categories with which we describe the world has been, after all, largely irretrievably compromised. It is in dislocated Enlightenment ideals about universal humanity, rights and duties, already marked by racism and chauvinism at their very foundations, that cultural scientists can often find sources of colonial violence and the brutality of the 20th century’s wars, the shadows of which still haunt a Europe often unwilling to come to terms with its heritage.

Nevertheless, as historian Susan Buck-Morss convincingly described in her analysis of the Haitian revolution, a certain layer of universal experience is worth saving – namely that which, in moments of strain, dehumanisation and humiliation, offers hope for emancipation and the recovery of basic dignity. Believing in universals here does not mean equating all experiences and ignoring their specificity – on the contrary, it expresses hope in the universal desire for self-determination, in the strength of the weaker and the more vulnerable.

Mikołaj Sobczak, "Mantis", 2020, photo: courtesy of the artist and the Servais Family Collection

The most ambitious works in the exhibition drawing on such a renewed belief in the universality of emancipatory aspirations, are the paintings – or rather, due to their experimental technique and materials, pictorial works – by Mikołaj Sobczak. His works explore queer genealogies, histories of oppression, and moments of transition and transformation in order to show how thinking about the past can be a laboratory for constructing the future. By freely combining themes from different cultures and times – the persecution of sexual minorities by the Stasi, the oppression of Ukrainian peasants by Polish landowners, the destruction of the house and works of the painter Polina Rajko by the Russians, and the first ever LGBTQ+ uprising at Compton’s Cafeteria – Sobczak allows us to think of history not so much as a sequence of inevitable successive events, but rather as an area of infinite potentiality, in which untapped forces and resources, possible scenarios, alternatives to what we have learned to see as inevitable, lie dormant all the time. The artist does acknowledge the uniqueness of historical phenomena though – this can be seen, for example, in the different techniques with which he represents individual events: combining prints and photographs in Zniewolenie [Captivity]; near-abstract painterly daubings with precise drawing in Pogrzeb [Burial]; or combining rich colour with sparing black and white in the fist-shaped painting Diana and Actaeon. He also suggests that universal ‘rescue stories’ are possible too in a world marked by imperial universalism.

Mikołaj Sobczak, "Funeral", 2022, fot. dzięki uprzejmości artysty

Related thoughts of universality and trans-historicity characterise the work of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, a Roma artist whose project Re-enchanting the World was one of the most talked about and most warmly received at the Venice Biennale in 2022. In Bozar, Mirga-Tas draws on personal themes close to her own life, not only depicting women during everyday activities, but also using fragments of their clothing sewn directly into the paintings. Enchanted in scraps of fabric, buttons and lace, the images seemingly depict the idyllic intimacy of the local community in which the artist operates, but in fact seem to tell a much more complex story about women’s activities and the transparency of their everyday work, things that do not fit into the canon of art. It is significant that the artist consistently turns to textiles – a medium also stereotypically associated with women and long disregarded by art institutions. Instead of proving the artistic status of fabric, Mirga-Tas is much more interested in its cultural connotations as a traditional craft – its thousands of years of history or the mythology associated with it. Her simple images are therefore only seemingly simple – for in generic scenes and everyday materials, we find reflections of a global history much older than the foundations of our contemporary societies and the boundaries they define.

Shared horizon

Joanna Warsza during the opening of "Familiar Strangers", Bozar, Brussels, 14th March 2025, photo: Kuba Celej/IAM

Although the perspectives of individual minorities may highlight completely different areas of culture and history – such as the origins of Polish capitalism and globalisation in the work of the Polish-Vietnamese artist Ngo Van Tuong, or the prejudices unknowingly expressed in language, as highlighted by the Polish-Nigerian activist and journalist Oliwia Bosomtwe – the Familiar Strangers exhibition curated by Warsza suggests that it is not difference that defines the subjectivity of groups, but what is shared. The plane on which the Self meets the Other, even if only for a moment, makes it possible to imagine a world in which, in the face of social atomisation, a community of experience, feeling and thinking is still salvaged. Familiar Strangers is a call to demand that the end of individual aspirations, demands and policies is marked by a shared horizon of responsibility for each other and the world we inhabit – a horizon we too often lose sight of.

"Familiar Strangers. The Eastern Europeans from a Polish Perspective". Curator: Joanna Warsza. Participating artists: Oliwia Bosomtwe, Assaf Gruber, Zuzanna Hertzberg, Renata Rara Kamińska, Jasmina Metwaly, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Natalia LL, Ngo Van Tuong, Open Group, Janek Simon, Shadow Architecture, Jana Shostak, Mikołaj Sobczak. Bozar Centre For Fine Arts, Brussels. 13.04–29.06.2025.

This exhibition forms part of the cultural programme of the Polish Presidency of the EU Council. It is co-organized by Adam Mickiewicz Institute and co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Poland.

Language English