Goddesses, Ghosts & Devils: Reclaiming Slavic Mythology in Contemporary Polish Art
Contemporary researchers often put the term Slavic mythology in quotation marks. However, the more mysterious and difficult to reconstruct the system of pre-Christian beliefs and customs on Polish lands becomes, the more the search for ‘incredible Slavicism’ arouses the imagination of contemporary Polish artists.
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Zofia Stryjeńska, "Bożki słowiańskie" series, 1917, photo: Andrzej Chęć / courtesy of the National Museum in Kraków
Since a visual pantheon of Slavic deities did not exist, it had to be created. This is what Zofia Stryjeńska did in the interwar period. In her lithographic portfolio entitled The Slavic Idols, the artist gave the preserved traces of Slavic mythology and images built on them the form of a full-blooded pantheon of local deities, often in fanciful creations worthy of Marvel superheroes. Stryjeńska's pantheon has a clear local identity. The Slavic goddesses and gods are different, she notes, from the ‘powerful demons of India or the bloodthirsty baals of Phoenicia’, as well as the ‘sensual superhumans of Greece’. They are, by contrast, ‘simple-minded phantoms who enliven the forests and look after the harvest. They are springs amid scorching heat. Friends of animals. The frolicking of the sun on the branches. Their bodies are made of clay, their hair is made of grain or branches, their moustaches are made of grass, and their dresses from the colourful vibrations of the air’.
The goddesses that Stryjeńska gave shapes to, Paulina Ołowska brought to life. In 2017, at The Kitchen in New York, the artist implemented the choreographic performance Slavic Goddesses – A Wreath of Ceremonies, referring once again to Stryjeńska's oeuvre in her work. Ołowska also created a series of paintings, entitled simply Zofia Stryjeńska, which was presented in 2008 at the Berlin Biennale. Ołowska quoted and reproduced Stryjeńska’s paintings, while clearly manipulating the source material; on the one hand, monumentalising and increasing the scale of the paintings, and on the other, depriving them of colour, reproducing them in greyscale, as in the book reproductions in which she first encountered them.
In the case of Slavic Goddesses, the revival of the past and the retrieval of Stryjeńska’s oeuvre as still relevant and open to new interpretative possibilities is all the more vivid and amazing. The work brings the goddesses to life. In Stryjeńska's graphics, movement was suggested by geometrisation and multiplication, close to cubist art, while in Ołowska's work it takes on a balletic form, with choreography by Katy Pyle, music by Sergei Tcherepnin, and costumes recreated by Ołowska from Stryjeńska's portfolio. The Slavic pantheon, in Stryjeńska's imagination close to everyday life, embedded in the local landscape and the rhythm of nature, in this case also remains close to humanity – it is a reflection of desires and fears; it allows for the spectacular expression of human characteristics.
A water nymph as a camgirl
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Justyna Górowska, "Corposhiva", WetMeWild, 2017, created in collaboration with Tadeusz Rolke, photo: Galeria Miejska Arsenał
In the WetMeWild project by Justyna Górowska, the artist herself impersonates a mythical figure. Górowska becomes a brzeginka, a Slavic water nymph, but she has little in common with the idyllic and mysterious Young Poland nymphs depicted in the paintings of Witold Pruszkowski. Górowska’s brzeginka, for example, instead of a folk dress wears a costume which surprisingly combines a navy-blue office suit with a bikini. She is associated with the element of water, but she appears not at a forest stream but in the gallery with a bottle of water, referring to its commodification and contamination with microplastics.
In Górowska’s imagination, the mythical rusałka (water nymph) seduces and tempts – diverts. In the case of the contemporary water nymph, however, it is not about luring village boys into rushes, but about meeting in erotic video chats, where the rusałka becomes a camgirl. As the artist said in a conversation with Anna Batko:
Meeting on a video chat, these conversations laced with erotica, allow me to interact more directly, build intimacy, shape desires, and smuggle in content that interests me. Mostly subliminally.
In the artist's hands, the figure of the water nymph becomes a tool for critically confronting two worlds. During her residency in New York, Górowska spread a transparent lube with the scent of the Polish forest on an underground station, but she also carried out actions that could be called performative sabotage – in augmented reality she marked bottled water with the symbol of contamination; and in shops, she replaced bottled water with tap water, which she gave a WetMeWild logo.
Performing a ritual
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Alicja Wysocka, Joanna Rajkowska "Przesilenie", 2018, photo: Marek Szczepański
Alicja Wysocka and Joanna Rajkowska, organisers of the Solstice project, which they started in 2018, also play the role of a kind of custodian of old traditions. Their work began with a macramé workshop led by Wysocka in the municipality of Golub-Dobrzyń in the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship, during which, together with women from the Circle of Village Housewives (the oldest in Poland, existing for over seventy years), the artists decided to carry out a project related to a mound located in the village of Nowogród – a remnant of early medieval buildings, and treated by some as a local chakra.
Evoking the Slavic tradition of celebrating the changing of the seasons, in this case on the Kupała Night of the summer solstice, the artists drew on ancient rituals and belief. As Wysocka said, pointing to a lack already diagnosed by Maria Janion, ‘I knew Parandowski's Mythology and all the Greek gods by heart, so I began to wonder where the knowledge of mythology from our latitude was and why it was not present in Polish schools’. On top of the mound-chakra a hut made of branches was erected, and around it herbs were symbolically burned to ward off evil energy. In collaboration with the local community, Wysocka and Rajkowska created a work in which ancient traditions were inevitably intertwined with today's socio-economic relations. As the artists wrote:
As the mound is private property, the dugout could not remain on it. So it was taken to the centre of the village, where the next part of the ritual took place near the school – covering it with a mixture of clay, straw and cow dung. This is a traditional method used in prehistoric construction. The dugout thus became a symbolic shelter: a place, a building, and a sculpture at the same time.
Solstice in Nowogród has become a cyclical event, which includes celebrating community as well as elements of ancient and modern folk history; from making harvest wreaths together and reading Slavic legends around a bonfire to symbolically sowing emmer wheat.
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Ewa Ciepielewska, „Holenderskie Ruskie”, mixed media, canvas, 267 x 367 cm, photo: press release of Galeria Bielska BWA
Ewa Ciepielewska is a veteran of open-air artistic events combining visual arts with the celebration of nature and local rituals. Ciepielewska is the co-organiser of Powitaniami Nowego Roku Księżycowego (Greeting the Lunar New Year) and the Flow project, an artistic residency on a barge floating down the Wisła River. The former included film screenings and open-air events. During one of these open-air events, in the Bieszczady Mountains, a monumental, open-air painting Holenderskie Ruskie (Dutch Ruthenians) was created. As the artist recalled, ‘I burned bonfires on the hillside and performed strange rituals so that it wouldn't rain and I could continue painting. After two weeks, when the truck came and took the painting away, it started raining’.
One of the co-organisers of Flow is Agnieszka Brzeżańska, who has her own interdisciplinary practice, encompassing painting, sculpture, photography, and video. For years, Brzeżańska has been creating a separate imaginarium, in which feminist and ecological themes take the form of abstract, cosmogonic canvases or ceramic vessels and figures imbued with matriarchal fertility symbolism. One of the most spectacular and direct works in which this symbolism found its outlet is the sculpture Source – a sculpture-fountain resembling a cult statue, a representation of an unknown goddess from whose womb a stream of water flows. Brzeżańska turns the vagueness and incompleteness of testimonies related to ancient cults and beliefs into an advantage – like Stryjeńska, she does not try to reconstruct a strictly local pantheon but builds a universal, cross-cultural and global story.
The great extinction of mythical beasts
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Daniel Rycharski, "Wiejski street art", photo: courtesy of the artist
The village of Kurówek became know all over Poland when mysterious, hybridised creatures began to appear on its streets. However, dog-roosters or fox-rabbits were not cryptids appearing occasionally in local press reports, but one of Daniel Rycharski's first works, entitled Rural Street Art. The first creatures populated the house of the artist's grandparents. With time, subsequent villagers themselves invited the artist to paint something on their properties – on the facades of their houses, the foundations of their barns, or on the interiors of their farm buildings. The stencil paintings created in the village since 2009 refer to local stories about mysterious animals, but they go far beyond illustrating legends about uncanny creatures. As in the artist's later works, the key element in them is participation, integration of the local community and creating art strongly rooted in the local context.
The very form of the depictions is adapted to this context. These are not spectacular, multicoloured, and detailed murals covering huge flat surfaces. On the contrary, in accordance with the spirit of the story about mysterious creatures seen in the blink of an eye, sneaking between trees and lurking in the twilight, they take the form of black shadows, sometimes visible from afar, at other times hidden in deep nooks and crannies, difficult to notice at first glance. Rycharski's creatures do not impose themselves on us, they do not compete for our attention; they seem to exist in their own world, indifferent to human attention.
The ancient stories thus presented do not recreate a specific bestiary, but reflect the spirit of the local legends. They follow the imagination that permeates them, in which foreign and familiar elements literally intertwine to create unearthly hybrids. Drawing on the characters of creatures from local tales also becomes a way to emphasise local identity, to save what is inevitably fading away in the darkness of the past with the decades-long modernisation and socio-economic changes, while their hybridity itself provides a commentary on the changes constantly taking place in rural areas today.
Repressed darkness
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Damien Brailly, "Devil stones" series, photo: courtesy of the artist
The interweaving of the old and the new also is evident in the longevity of old traditions acquiring new meanings and the seepage of pre-Christian, animistic thinking about nature into the new culture. Damien Brailly, an artist working between France and Poland, in his photographs from the series Devil Stones (2019-2020) documents elements of the landscape in which an ancient imagination peeks through from beneath the Christian surface. The black and white prints show massive glacial erratics, remnants of the last ice age, which have become elements of local legends due to their forms. The eponymous devil stones, also known as ‘czarcie głazy’ in Polish, are mainly found in Warmia, Masuria, and Kashubia. The monumental rock formations in forest landscapes are associated in folk tales with devils, who supposedly placed or abandoned them. The grooves on the rocks’ surfaces were interpreted as traces of devilish claws. Brailly not only documents them, but also describes them, both geologically and mythically, thus creating a kind of double atlas of natural monuments and local beliefs.
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Aleksandra Waliszewska, untitled, gouache, 25x35cm, 2012-2014, photo: courtesy of the artist
While Brailly describes devilish stories with the insight and frigidity of a documentalist, in Aleksandra Waliszewska's paintings, the demonised ‘incredible Slavicism’ reveals its predatory face. In Waliszewska's gouaches, myth, fairy tale, dreams, and pop culture awe merge into one, creating a world devoid of rational frames. However, unlike mythical and fairy tale stories, tensions are never worked through, threats are never dismissed, there are no morals or just judgements here – pure violence is one of the basic rules of this world. What has been repressed according to psychoanalytic diagnoses returns with a double, destructive force.
Various traditions also intertwine and reveal their menacing faces in the works of the Polish Roma artist Krzysztof Gil. The central element of one of the artist's latest realisations – entitled The More You Trim, The bigger It Gets and carried out as part of the exhibition They Call Me Gypsy But That’s Not My Name, curated by Anna Batko at the Gdańsk City Gallery – is a black, multi-eyed figure of a fortune-teller sitting at a table densely covered with candles. In the work, fears of exoticized Roma culminate, but also the remnants of Slavic culture intertwine with Romani culture. As the creator said, it refers to:
Ghostly dolls – representations of Roma in ethnographic museums that I saw when I was still a child, but also to St. Sarah, the Egyptian slave and first Christian woman, who is considered by the Roma to be their saint, even if the legend that the Roma came to Europe from Egypt is just a Western invention. I am fascinated precisely by such looping mechanisms of appropriation, but also by the hybrid identity that pierces through them. The doll might as well be Baba Siuda – an incarnation of a Slavic priestess with a face smeared with fire, who in the folk Easter tradition is represented by a man dressed as a woman with a face painted black. Baba Siuda, led by a gypsy, another disguised person, goes from house to house and soils the inhabitants with soot.
On the basis of the preserved remains, we may never be able to create a Slavic equivalent of Jan Parandowski's classic Mythology. The exploration of old beliefs, deities and mythical creatures, rituals and their afterimages filtered through later traditions in the activities of contemporary artists shows, however, that even these snippets contain what is most important in mythology – the ability to explain the real world.
Originally written in Polish, translated by Agnes Dudek, Dec 2021
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