Lives Across the Carpathians: Michał Szymko on Lemko Art Beyond Ethnography

pme_4901_walczak_1.jpg, default, Michal Szymko giving a tour of the exhibition 'Forms of Presence: Art of the Lemkos/Carpatho-Rusyns', 2026, State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw, photo

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Bringing together figures such as Nikifor, Andy Warhol and Jerzy Nowosielski, the exhibition ‘Forms of Presence: The Art of Lemkos/Carpatho-Rusyns’ at Warsaw’s Ethnographic Museum traces a culture shaped by rupture, migration and reinvention. Curator Michał Szymko speaks to Culture.pl about how to tell the story of a minority heritage without reducing it to folklore or fixing it in the past.

The Lemkos are one of the Carpathian Rusyn groups – an East Slavic people historically inhabiting the Beskid Niski and Sądecki ranges, today divided between Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine, as well as a widespread diaspora. Their culture developed at the intersection of Byzantine Christianity, vernacular traditions and the shifting borders of Central and Eastern Europe, producing a distinct language, religious practice and visual heritage, particularly in icon painting and architecture.

The 20th century brought profound disruption: wartime violence, forced displacements and the 1947 Operation Vistula campaign scattered Lemko communities across Poland, fracturing the continuity of cultural transmission. Contemporary Lemko identity therefore unfolds between memory and reinvention, shaped as much by absence, migration and multilingualism as by rooted, place-based traditions.

Anastazja Kanarska: The exhibition ‘Forms of Presence: The Art of Lemkos/Carpatho-Rusyns’ addresses a minority culture, yet it contains neither nostalgia nor the hush of a museum. Which mattered more to you: memory or the present?

Michał Szymko: This exhibition matters to me precisely because it addresses a minority culture while refusing to stay at the level of memory or nostalgia. It speaks just as powerfully about modernity and endurance. It shows that despite an extraordinarily dramatic 20th century – after Thalerhof [an internment camp for Rusyns from Galicia and Bukovina, operating between 1914 and 1917 – ed.], after World War II, after Operation Vistula, after the experience of communism that systematically sought to destroy our culture, after protracted processes of assimilation – the culture of the Carpathian Rusyns has not disappeared.

AK: It still exists, albeit in an altered form.

MS: Today, the young generation of Lemkos operates across several languages. Some use Lemko, some Polish. I myself am an example of this – my first language is Polish. This interrupted, disrupted transmission of identity remains one of the most significant post-war experiences and continues to resonate strongly in artistic practice.

At the same time, it was essential to me that the exhibition brought together artists from different diasporas. Darjan Hardi from Serbia is present, as are Adalbert Erdélyi and Józef Bokšay, founders of the Transcarpathian school of painting – artists closely associated with Uzhhorod and Budapest. This demonstrates that we’re not dealing with a single local narrative but with a network of experiences stretched across borders.

A particularly significant presence in the exhibition is Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit – a Hutsul woman from the Ukrainian Carpathians. Her work, read today from a contemporary perspective, remains strikingly relevant. Though she’s sometimes described as a folk artist or writer, her voice reaches far beyond folkloric categories and continues to move audiences with its intensity. During one of the guided tours, someone asked why we hadn’t included her paintings. I explained that we very much wanted to, but that she clearly stated in her will that her works must never leave Ukraine. That was her unambiguous wish, and as a curator I feel bound to honour it fully. That’s why the exhibition only features her photographs. The cycle opens and closes with the figure of Paraska – in the final photograph, she gazes into the Carpathians, into the distance, ahead of her.

Her presence moves me deeply. I hope that those who weren’t previously familiar with her work will pause at these photographs. They carry enormous documentary value, but also an existential one: they allow us today to reconstruct what life was like in a Hutsul village, while simultaneously prompting questions about the meaning of memory, presence and cultural continuity.

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Curator Michal Szymko & project coordinator Agnieszka Kleszcz at the exhibition 'Forms of Presence: Art of Lemkos/Carpatho-Rusyns', 2026, State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw, photo: Przemysław Walczak / State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw

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AK: The exhibition has been promoted using the names of Nikifor and Andy Warhol, but I can see a distinctly feminine face is also clearly visible.

MS: If you look at the history of Lemko art through a long-term lens, its markedly androcentric character becomes apparent – for decades its narrative was primarily shaped by men: sculptors and painters. Meanwhile, in the younger generation, the voices of women are continuing to grow louder, enriching and completing the existing canon. The exhibition brings together women artists from different places and generations – from Olena Mandičová and Maria Janko, to contemporary creators such as Kamila Trochanowska, Katarzyna Szweda, Joanna Śpiak-Jadłosz and Justyna Maksymczak.

There are also nameless figures – Rusyn women who embroidered, ran households and sustained their community, whose presence has survived only in painted representations and in material traces. Artefacts such as the czepiec [bridal cap] and huńka [traditional sheepskin coat] aren’t functioning here as folkloric props, but as testimony to their invisible labour and to an alternative archive of women’s history.

AK: The exhibition clearly seems to have a personal dimension.

MS: The entire scenography has been designed as a sequence of experiences. The very first section is bisected by a symbolic curtain, dividing it into two sequences and introducing a moment of suspension – a passage into the depths of memory.

The second section is devoted to identity, but also to the experience of the Carpathians and to the heart of Lemko culture: icons and churches. It’s a space of immersion – in landscape, spirituality and the forms that have constituted the community across the centuries.

The third part has a trans-pop character. Scenographically, it transports the visitor to Warhol’s Factory, to New York, where local heritage meets the global language of art and pop culture.

The fourth and closing section is Dorota Nieznalska’s work Violence and Memory. It leaves the viewer in direct confrontation with the faces of the deported – Lemkos, Roma, Ukrainians, Highlanders. It’s a silent cry.

And a question that keeps returning: why?

Every time I visit this exhibition, I discover something new in it.

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View of the exhibition 'Forms of Presence: Art of the Lemkos/Carpatho-Rusyns', 2026, State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw, photo: Anastazja Kanarska

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AK: What was your own point of entry into the Lemko world?

MS: I can clearly remember the day when, at the Museum of Lemko Culture in Zyndranowa, I picked up a painting by Teodor Kuziak depicting a Lemko woman. I saw an entire cosmos in her face. It was almost masculine, yet unmistakably feminine. Austere and cold, and at the same time piercingly sad, as though she carried within her a weight older than a single lifetime.

I stood holding the painting and began to cry. I wept for a long time, without holding back. I had the sense that I was mourning my great-grandmother, my relatives displaced by Operation Vistula, but also something beyond specific people. I was mourning a broken continuity, a memory that demands to be heard. It was an experience that came from deep within – beyond control, beyond distance – an experience that occurs before language.

That was when I understood that this was what I wanted to do: to speak about Lemko art. This exhibition grew from that moment. First as a need to search for myself, and later as a path towards artists and towards answers to questions that had been maturing within me for a long time. I can now answer some of them, but others remain open, and perhaps that’s how they should stay.

Why did any of this happen? That question returns to me constantly. And yet it’s precisely in its persistent return that I find strength. I see it when I look at the young generation of Lemkos – present at the opening and present still – who thanked me for this exhibition by singing Mnohaja i Blahaja Lita, a song performed at birthdays and significant moments of communal life. It was a deeply moving experience, confirming that memory, even when wounded, can still be a source of life.

Today, after ten years of work on this exhibition, after completing my doctorate, after an intimate show at the Etnocentrum in Krosno, I felt it was right for Forms of Presence to open now. That timing proved necessary: time for maturing, for ordering experience, for learning attentiveness. It’s only thanks to that that I’ve been able to speak in my own language. It’s not a language borrowed solely from reading or theoretical influences, but a conscious language – it’s mine, but in harmony with the voices of the artists I held conversations with. It’s a language that grows from experience, from relationships, and from responsibility for the words one speaks.

Forms of Presence: Art of the Lemkos/Carpatho-Rusyns – Image Gallery

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AK: Who would you most like to invite to ‘Forms of Presence’?

MS: The exhibition was born from a need to present our art as an autonomous practice – not as some appendage to ethnographic context or as a marginal historical footnote. Of course I’d like to invite Carpathian Rusyns, but this is equally an invitation addressed to the art world and to institutions that still too rarely recognise minority experience as an equal partner in the narrative. I’m also thinking of those people who might discover here, for the first time, that this history is not someone else’s – that it also helped shape the reality in which they themselves live. This is an exhibition for everyone.

If it can trigger that recognition, it fulfils its purpose. Poland, like the other countries where Carpathian Rusyns live, was never mono-ethnic – which is why the art history of Europe is also the art history of its ethnic minorities.

‘Forms of Presence: The Art of Lemkos / Carpatho-Rusyns’ at the Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw runs from 17 January to 30 June 2026: visit the official website here.

_{Interview conducted in Jan 2026, translated by Adam Zulawski, May 2026}

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