Emergency Exits: Polish Visual Art in 2020
For years, the Polish art world has been probing its own inner workings. Could it be that the whole system is out-of-date and in need of rethinking? Such questions have historically been rhetorical in nature – but this year, due the pandemic, there was a need to confront them.
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Exhibition view of ‘Origins’ by Justyna Górowska, photo: courtsey of the artist & lokal_30
Visual art is one of the domains most overshadowed by the ongoing pandemic. While contemporary artists make use of a wide range of media, including digital tools, at the end of the day, their work is usually destined for museums or galleries. Works created and intended to be experienced online still hover at the margins of artistic production. When the first lockdown hit, in March, the apparent lack of any ‘emergency exit’ proved painful. While in film, projects were stalled, but their premieres could eventually be transferred from cinema houses to streaming, the art world found itself in the opposite situation: artists could continue to create work in their studios, but they had nowhere to show it.
The first response from exhibiting institutions was therefore in line with the times. Given that most areas of artistic activity had moved to the Internet, online exhibitions broke out as well – or at the bare minimum, video exhibition tours. In Poland, online 3D exhibitions had been popping up even before the pandemic; take 01 Gallery, founded by the three young artists Łukasz Stylec, Dominik Urbański and Robert Kowalski, which has been operating since 2017. But 01 presents projects which assume a fully virtual presentation from the start, and are based on specific, 3D mini-worlds created through a collaboration between the artists and the gallery team (who take care of the technical aspects). By contrast, the ‘crisis’ online exhibitions grew from an attempt to recreate the white cube, giving the impression of a sad prosthesis.
A stormy romance with Instagram
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‘Self-House Residency’, Justina Los, photo: courtesy of the artist
Artists who used social media as an artistic platform found the most interesting ways to meet the challenge of shifting everything online. For several years now, Instagram has played a role of no small importance in the art world – as a tool for self-presentation, networking, and aiding the flow of ideas. At the beginning of the lockdown, the artists Magdalena Morawik and Łukasz Horbów decided to take advantage of such opportunities by creating the Self-House Residency project.
For a full week, successive artists took control of the project’s Instagram profile, presenting their activities there in photographs or videos. The platform gave them an opportunity to show images or sculptures, which they had fancifully arranged in their apartments – as was the case with Øleg&Kaśka’s biennale presented inside a refrigerator. Julia Dobrobińska and Horacy Muszyński created prank YouTube films, while artists like Zuza Golińska, sewing masks, presented activities related to the pandemic itself.
The project managed to demonstrate one unquestionable advantage of social media over traditional showings – the ease with which it can foster new, international collaborations. Exhibiting the work of foreign artists in galleries involves the high costs of transportation and loaning agreements, which force a certain conservatism when considering which artists to involve. But the Self-House Residency allowed young, as-of-yet unknown artists from all around Europe to present themselves to a wider public.
At the same time, Silicon Valley technologies have a less friendly side – as Justyna Górowska pointed out in her Origins project, which also made use of Instagram. By transforming Henryk Wiciński’s constructivist paintings into Instagram filters, the artist made their function into pure camouflage. The abstract compositions, in various shades of brown, fulfil not only an aesthetic function, but also a practical one – they serve to mislead the platform’s algorithms, preventing them from collecting data on users’ skin colour.
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‘bez tytułu’ (untitled) by Jan Eustachy Wolski, Bikebrothers bike shop & store, Tarnów, photo: courtesy of the Hestia Artistic Journey Foundation
The later part of the year, with its second lockdown, brought a 180-degree turn in terms of exhibition ideas. Unable to open their doors as in pre-COVID times – and at the same time, newly aware of the many disadvantages of online exhibitions – some institutions sought a third way, presenting works ‘live’, but in atypical spaces. A kind of artistic ‘window shopping’ has become popular, where exhibitions are made accessible to passers-by, or where artworks are presented around courtyards or in urban nooks and crannies.
The trail for this practice had already been cleared in the spring. A long weekend in May saw Pieszymaj (May-Walk) – an exhibition initiated by Izabela Zawadzka and Kamil Kuitkowski, which took place ‘in the field’. The associated works of art could be seen while wandering around the city, in the windows of the artists’ apartments or on balconies or streets. One of the visual symbols of the year was List (Letter) – a reference to Tadeusz Kantor’s 1967 happening of the same title. The new project was realised by a group of women artists on 6th May, when they protested the planned vote-by-mail presidential election by carrying a giant banner in the shape of an envelope from Warsaw’s Main Post Office to the Sejm. The banner read: ‘Żyć nie, umierać’ (‘Don’t live, die’), pointing out the public-health risks of holding the election during the pandemic.
By the end of the year, initiatives targeted to regular museum-goers and chance visitors alike had spread across Poland. Institutions lik Muzeum Sztuki Łódź and the Contemporary Art Gallery in Opole presented artwork through windowpanes. Meanwhile, in Gdańsk, where this year’s edition of Narrations festival was canceled, a mini-festival of art was presented instead, organised by the Institute of Urban Culture. The show encouraged visitors to search for subtle artistic interventions which had been scattered in more- and less-accessible places around the city – from billboards to backyards. The winners of the last Hestia Artistic Journey contest, in turn, presented a series of individual presentations in venues which suffered great losses during the pandemic. Part of the Okno (Windows) project, the project saw editions in several cities, from Rzeszów to Żyrardów or Szczecin.
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‘La Noble Pastorale (Szlachetny Pastorał)’ (Noble Pastoral) by Suzanne Husky, 2016/2017, tapestry, photo: courtesy of the artist
All of this said, in the break between the first and second lockdowns, a number of exhibitions did take place more like usual – albeit most often in slightly changed or limited forms. The content of the most interesting of these was only emphasised by the pandemic, bringing a depressing mood.
From September to November, the Zachęta National Gallery of Art presented Joanna Piotrowska’s first Polish retrospective. Her black-and-white photographs, while formally tasteful, focussed on ambiguity and awkwardness in interpersonal relationships. With their sense of anxiety – even in the coziest, seemingly most safe spaces of the subjects’ own apartments – they could not have been shown at a more appropriate time.
Also topical was the The Penumbral Age at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Curated by Jagna Lewandowska and Sebastian Cichocki, the exhibition was yet another attempt to discuss the climate crisis through an exhibition. And yet, it proposed an unconventional approach to the subject. The exhibition referenced a book written by two scientists, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, which describes a potential dark future – the result of humanity’s inaction and utter paralysis in the face of all-too-well-known facts about the destructive effects of climate change. On the one hand, the exhibition took the familiar distanced, geological approach to the theme of viewing art, while on the other, it reimagined how to even create a sustainable exhibition, so as to avoid further damage to the environment, however small in scale.
Where have all the symposia gone?
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‘Wracając do Przyszłości’ (Returning to the Future), exhibition view, inside of the project ‘Inside Job’, by Ula Lucińska & Michał Knychaus, 2020, photo: Marek Lalko
If the art world’s day-to-day functions are organised around the activities of museums and galleries, large international biennials and triennials make up the more festive events, taking place everywhere from Venice to Istanbul, Sydney, and São Paulo. For the art world’s typical ‘schedule’, the outbreak of the pandemic had an effect not unlike the French Revolution’s on the Gregorian calendar. Although some of these events took place in one form or another this year – whether physically, in Berlin, when the pandemic appeared to be subsiding, or online, as was the case with Riga – 2020 offered an opportunity to rethink the biennial ‘formula’ and also to reconsider local projects in a more favourable light.
It just so happens that this year, two events in Poland took their inspiration from local traditions – even making for a kind of alternative to international exhibitions focused on ‘show’. The Symposium Wrocław 70/20 (Wrocław 70/20 Symposium) took place on the 50th anniversary of the Wrocław ’70 Art Symposium, which is considered to be the birth of Polish conceptual art. Referring to the older tradition of artistic symposia which were organised on the so-called Recovered Territories in the 1960s and 1970s, this event combined historical exhibitions with unrealised projects from half a century ago. As a testament to the diversity of Wrocław’s art scene today, it also included a host of smaller exhibitions, discussions, and events.
In a similar vein, the city of Zielona Góra held its Biennale in the fall. It drew upon the tradition of its local Złote Grono (Golden Circle) event, which was organised from the 1960s to the early 1980s, as well as the New Art Biennale of the 1980s and ‘90s. As part of the event, the Lubuska Land Museum inaugurated its permanent exhibition of the Złote Grono collection. While extremely important at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, it has been forgotten today. Meanwhile, the BWA Zielona Góra presented a melancholic exhibition linking past and present, turning a sensitive eye towards some of the less-prominent remnants of historic art events, mining their value. In this pandemic year, such a careful study of the past was ultimately more refreshing than the usual, frenetic production of ad-hoc commentary.
Originally written in Polish, translated by Lauren Dubowski, 30 Dec 2020
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