The Afterlife of Socialist International Exhibitions: Reviewing ‘What Are Our Collective Dreams?’
Zachęta’s latest exhibition revisits the Cold War’s forgotten cultural alliances, revealing how yesterday’s socialist friendships haunt today’s institutional positioning. It co-opts the Iron Curtain’s cultural legacy through archival materials.
Installation by Ibrahim Mahama as part of the ‘What Are Our Collective Dreams? Global Connections — Abandoned Friendships’ exhibition, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, 2025, photo by Daniel Rumiancew / Zachęta archive, CC BY-SA 3.0
Zachęta – National Gallery of Art has always metabolised ideology; its walls absorb whatever a regime needs reflected back. Founded in 1860, nationalised in 1949, and reshaped in the 1990s, it now stands in a Poland confronting the spectre of a new Iron Curtain, a geopolitical atmosphere tinged with déjà vu. Inside, at the start of What Are Our Collective Dreams? Global Connections — Abandoned Friendships, Ibrahim Mahama's Out of Bounds wraps the central staircase in empty jute sacks, stripped of cocoa, coal, rice, former supply materials reinforcing a neoclassical shell. Architecture remembers what diplomacy forgets. His intervention reroutes a trade route through the neoclassical building, sending Ghanaian labour histories upward through a space once used to export ideology. You climb; the sacks remind you someone else carried the weight. It retains a sense of disruption, even as Mahama’s jute sacks-based installations are spatially adapted by so many global art institutions, marking his artistic prominence while also revealing institutional fatigue in developing original, locally grounded responses to new colonialism.
Curated by Taras Gembik, Joanna Kordjak, and Antonina Stebur, the exhibition revisits a neglected chapter of the Polish People’s Republic: Zachęta’s role – then as the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions (CBWA) – within the infrastructure of 'internationalist friendship' linking Poland to Latin America, India, Vietnam, and Palestine. These alliances were ambivalent, pairing emancipatory ideals with extractivism and uneven power. The curators return to this past not to idealize it, but to see what it reveals about present conditions and potential futures of solidarity. In these once abandoned, and now rediscovered pre-1989 networks lie traces of art’s political and cross-cultural agency.
The co-opted archive
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'Social Stadium' by Minerva Cuevas at the ‘What Are Our Collective Dreams? Global Connections — Abandoned Friendships’ exhibition, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, 2025, photo by Daniel Rumiancew / Zachęta archive, CC BY-SA 3.0
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The world map, layered with posters of socialist international exhibitions and punctuated by hanging artworks, makes one thing clear: Eastern Europe has never enjoyed the luxury of imagining itself outside global power dynamics. Poland negotiates its position once more, poised between an embattled Ukraine, an authoritarian Belarus, and a Western gaze that reads the region as a buffer zone, albeit one with respectable museums.
The exhibition borrows forms and memories from the post-Soviet archive while speaking fluently in Western institutional vernacular. The message is subtle but firm: we belong here now, not there. The Third World, once a partner in socialist dreams, has become the Global South, the periphery, visible, yet seen from a different altitude, filtered through predatory capitalism and Westernized cultural infrastructure.
As if crisis itself were aestheticised, and political tensions dressed up as celebration, retro-pop aesthetics and impressive large-scale installations come to dominate the exhibition: bold colours, a playful swing set, and a warm, inviting space. Visitors move freely, interact, and experience collectively. The exhibitions is as social as it is visual, a participatory journey in colour and form.
Several artworks excavate overlooked socialist exhibition histories, illuminating the international exchanges that Poland once plugged into, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes strategically. For example, Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ amplifies the largely present but rarely heard Vietnamese community by the means of the Archival Ring: A Sensed Absence site-specific installation, echoing Poland’s little-known 1959 Vietnamese Art exhibition. By replicating Hosni Radwan’s Palestinian painting In Memory of Palestine from the archives of Zachęta’s 1980 International Art Exhibition for Palestine in Beirut (1978), Ahmet Öğüt resurrects the artwork, restaging inherited artistic solidarities. Minerva Cuevas riffs on the historic Mexican exhibition, drawing parallels between the US–Mexican border and the Polish–Belarusian frontier in a form of a monumental mural titled Social Stadium. Laila Shawa, returning after participating in the 1980. Palestinian Painting exhibition, brings her Wall of Gaza lithographs into dialogue with past struggles and present urgencies.
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Chilean arpilleras at the ‘What Are Our Collective Dreams? Global Connections — Abandoned Friendships’ exhibition, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, 2025, photo by Daniel Rumiancew / Zachęta archive, CC BY-SA 3.0
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The Indian Aravani Art Project , centering trans and cis women, represented by another large-scale mural, extends this lineage of shared resistance, opening space for collective action, exemplified by a spontaneous choir performance of Slavic folk songs. Chilean Arpilleras – three-dimensional appliqué textiles created under Pinochet and shown in Poland in 1978, sit alongside Oksana Briukhovetska’s textile collages, such as In Solidarity with Women of the World, a premake of a 1960s Soviet poster, which trace connections to African American quilting and Ukrainian textile traditions. Together, these artworks map a vibrant feminist, socialist-realist visual language, showing how women across geographies, races, and political contexts forged solidarities, often against the odds.
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A mural by the Indian Aravani Collective and the 'Drop It Off Station' video by Maria Romankiv and Weronika Zalewska at the ‘What Are Our Collective Dreams? Global Connections — Abandoned Friendships’ exhibition, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, 2025, photo by Daniel Rumiancew / Zachęta archive, CC BY-SA 3.0
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What feels familiar, daily and realistic is the video Drop It Off Station, in which Marta Romankiv and Weronika Zalewska collaborate with five app-based couriers from Pakistan, Zimbabwe, and Belarus, choreographing the daily grind of migration, labour, and algorithms. The artwork exposes the hidden rhythms of work that power the imminent economy, while Hamlet Lavastida’s Cultura Profiláctica illustration remind us how Cuban propaganda disciplined bodies first through prevention as warning, then represses them through the military and police. Meanwhile, GALAS’s (Vladyslav Gryn’s) another participatory solidarity kitchen Let Us Cook outpost in the gallery, nurtures international bodies, Chechens, Tatars and other migrants, feeding more than stomachs and mapping care across lines of displacement. Solidarity and extractivism: two words that dominate contemporary art-speak. Here, they collide, overlap, and fracture, revealing how the gestures of care we celebrate are always entangled with systems that exploit.
The boomerang
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'Haunted Museum' by Nadira Husain at the ‘What Are Our Collective Dreams? Global Connections — Abandoned Friendships’ exhibition, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, 2025, photo by Daniel Rumiancew / Zachęta archive, CC BY-SA 3.0
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Zachęta doesn’t embalm history. It wields it knowingly. This exhibition structures the archive around non-Western knowledge production, imperfect solidarities, the politics of poetics and intimacy, and the material traces of extractivist practices. Artists interrogate history rather than illustrate it, prying open the Cold War’s modest paper relics and asking: what happens when ideological debris becomes curatorial raw material?
(Institutional backing – like that of the private OmenaArt Foundation – lurks as an undercurrent, a reminder that visibility is never unmediated; it always carries a sponsor.)
Yesterday: socialist internationalism, promises of friendship, cooperation, cultural exchange. Today: global North institutions turning southward, armed with strategic decolonial vocabulary and carefully designed installations. The continuity stings. Friendship, the exhibition suggests, is always a political technology. When it falters, distance steps in, and with it, the logic of othering, a quiet echo of those who prefer the familiar over the reciprocal.
Hardly novel, the appearance of Ibrahim Mahama, Ciudad Abierta’s experimental spatial interventions, Nadira Husain’s 3-D, candy-coloured triptych Haunted Museum – where Nefertiti claims agency in Adidas trainers – alongside Chilean Arpilleras and Marina Naprushkina’s swing set What Are Our Collective Dreams? evoking the political and emotional instability of migrant and Belarusian diaspora communities, reads as familiar.
These choices are a curatorial boomerang: documenta’s legacy collides with the Art Basel effect, folding political relevance into a familiar formula. It also shows how socialist legacies are repackaged through the logic of the capitalist art market, where internationalism becomes branding and solidarity learns to perform. The show gestures at challenging institutional hierarchies, yet mirrors them just as easily, prompting the question: can curating ever escape these established circuits to generate genuinely expanded, research-driven constellations, or will it ever become performance of criticality? The curators leave just enough dissonance at the edges to keep the exhibition alive. The artworks hold their positions, but the questions they spark are far complex than the impressive installations that contain them.
How dreams remain dreams, and what this reveals about the politics of possibility
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Lithographs at the ‘What Are Our Collective Dreams? Global Connections — Abandoned Friendships’ exhibition, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, 2025, photo by Daniel Rumiancew / Zachęta archive, CC BY-SA 3.0
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The exhibition asks us to think about collective dreams – provisional, persistent, often unrealized. We hope for a world where power serves the many, not entrench hierarchies. We hope for an art world that isn’t just another hegemonic apparatus. And yet, the show reminds us how fragile those hopes are.
Exhibitions could do more than circulate familiar names or reproduce institutional formulas. They could open spaces for visibility with difference, research and political restructuring. Even then, the interventions remain contingent. The emotional, material, and political traces of past networks persist, evidence of solidarity, extraction, displacement, but fully just, attentive connections? They remain always unsettled.
Here, collective dreams are not fulfilled outcomes. They are transitory. Necessary. Jovial. A space where hope collides with critique and political constraints, where dreaming a different world is work that never ends.
What Are Our Collective Dreams? Global Connections – Abandoned Friendships
was curated by Taras Gembik, Joanna Kordjak, Antonina Stebur, Zachęta
This text was written as part of the first edition of the MOST Visiting Critics Program, which took place from the 20th to the 24th of November 2025. The programme, developed by the co-editor-in-chief team of MOST Magazine, was launched through the generous support of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, and aims to cultivate a vibrant, transnational community of critics, curators, and artists, connected through shared engagement with the Polish contemporary art scene.
MOST is an online, English language contemporary art journal that focuses on the region known as Central and Eastern Europe. Defining this term broadly, MOST is interested in tracing artistic and cultural practices, mapping local identities, and highlighting both commonalities and diversities. MOST is an independent initiative, founded in 2023 by Vera Zalutskaya, Ewa Borysiewicz and Katie Zazenski.
