Created as part of the Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the exhibition Familiar Strangers at the Bozar Cultural Centre in Brussels is a story about Central and Eastern Europe told from the perspective of its inhabitants, people who contradict existing stereotypes, spread over a dozen artistic voices.
For project curator Joanna Warsza, one of the impulses for the exhibition was growing up in Eastern Europe in the 1980s and feeling that, although the people of Poland were Europeans, they were the poorer ones, and that in a sense the ‘real’ Europe was elsewhere. In fact, the histories of colonialism, imperialism, emancipation and feminism were different on the two sides of the Elbe river. Europe has points in common, but also divergences. Familiar Strangers explores this all, showing us a complex picture of Eastern Europe from a Polish perspective.
The familiar in the unfamiliar, the foreign in the well-known
Assaf Gruber, "Story of a Scared State", 2016, still from video, photo: courtesy of the artist
The exhibition is addressing this theme at a time when European identity is being redefined. Joanna Warsza highlights these issues by bringing to the surface the commonalities and distinctive features that Eastern Europeans have as a community. At the same time, Familiar Strangers allows us to look at the construct of ‘Eastern European identity’ from different perspectives, without also turning a blind eye to what is seemingly separate or that stands out, peering at the familiar in the unfamiliar.
Also, contrary to stereotypes, what does this identity really consist of? We find the Roma minority, Vietnamese socialist intellectuals who became early capitalists, as well as artistic Belarusian and Ukrainian activists. Wandering through the narrative of the exhibition, we also come across feminist and queer resistance, and complex Polish-Jewish relations. These are ongoing negotiations about the coexistence of different cultures, minorities, religions and languages, a phenomenon well known to the multicultural centres of Western Europe. The exhibition’s placement in the cosmopolitan Bozar provides an additional, enriching context for the stories spun within it.
View of the exhibition "Familiar Strangers", Bozar, Brussels, 14.3.2025, photo: Kuba Celej/IAM
Joanna Warsza raises questions not only about identity itself, but also about what is proper Eastern European heritage. This seems crucial insofar as the answer can go beyond the cliched and even ‘touristic’ perception of Eastern Europe. Artistic figures gain a special role in understanding this identity, situating themselves on its margins but still feeling like part of its heritage, being people who are simultaneously alien and well-known. Warsza has deliberately exposed this marginality by removing all the familiar symbols of Eastern European art from the exhibition, in particular getting rid of the martyrdom narrative, as well as symbols that reflect classical perceptions of Polishness. By offering the space to artistic figures relegated to the margins of Polish history – people seemingly ineligible when it comes to being labelled ‘native’ – and placing their voice in the foreground, the exhibition gains a nuanced and objective perspective.
The physical emanation of polyphony
The fragmented Eastern European identity is also reflected in the physical space of the exhibition itself. The gallery, which runs above and around the main hall, is made up of a series of interconnected rooms, each belonging to a different artist. The architect, artist and set designer Aleksandra Wasilkowska is responsible for this layout, also designing an accompanying common area: a place where we can reflect and explore the artists’ catalogues. Wasilkowska has focused the space around furniture made from materials salvaged from the Bakalarska bazaar – huge halls in south-west Warsaw that bring together hundreds of micro-businesses, services and catering outlets, mainly run by migrants and their descendants.
View of the exhibition "Familiar Strangers", Bozar, Brussels, 14.3.2025, photo: Kuba Celej/IAM
The exhibition opens with Janek Simon’s Meta Folklore and ends with a work by Asaf Gruber, bookends that deepen the multiculturalism theme and emphasise the message of Eastern Europe’s ambiguous genealogy and multifacetedness.
Meta Folklore is a collection of folk art imagery, mainly focused on representations of human figures from Europe, East Asia, the Canary Islands, Africa and South America. Simon takes a broad approach to understanding what is local and specific in visual culture, taking away, as it were, its geographical context. He achieves this effect through the use of an artificial intelligence algorithm that generalises and extracts essence from the data collated by the artist. This in turn makes use of 3D printers to produce multicultural sculptural objects that do not easily fit within any known ethnographic canon’s classifications.
In contrast, Assaf Gruber’s closing video work Miraculous Accident (one of two by the artist in the exhibition) is a melancholic tale of love and friendship, told from the perspective of memories. The protagonists are a Moroccan student called Nadir, a Jewish film teacher called Edyta, and their friend Jarek. The story takes place in 1968 in Łódź, where Nadir comes to learn communist film techniques. Edyta, despite her opposition to Zionism, is forced to leave Poland because of the political rift between Poland and Israel after the Six-Day War. Their paths meet again in the Polish city when Nadir returns in 2024 after finding a letter from Edyta written in 1989 that is filled with uplifting feelings and reflections on human destiny and a sense of belonging.
The theme of Jewish heroines is also touched upon by Zuzanna Hertzberg, an artist, researcher and activist. She highlights Jewish women activists through her work, exploring their history in Poland from the early 20th century up until today. In Familiar Strangers, we find her banner-type object, created to empower the heroines of these stories.
Possible fields of rescue
Rosa Luxemburg, an anti-imperialist and Marxist revolutionary who was also Jewish and a would-be botanist, emerges as the central figure of another section of the exhibition. As one of the first ‘ecological activists’, even before the term existed, she criticised our remoteness from nature and the devastating impact of industry, themes which underpinned her writing and social criticism. This is why her extraordinary contact with nature, especially the herbariums she kept, even while in prison, have become the subject of detailed analysis today by artistic figures such as installation artist Karolina Freino and photographer Witek Orski.
View of the exhibition "Familiar Strangers", Bozar, Brussels, 14.3.2025, photo: Kuba Celej/IAM
In Familiar Strangers, Renata Rara Kamińska’s work Miedza refers to herbariums, seeing them as a kind of private garden that Luxemburg never had, but also as a space of inner freedom that she found through communion with plants, even in the prison yard. Kamińska’s installation is a garden for Luxemburg: a corridor of dried flowers, weeds and wild plants. Miedza becomes a memorial-tribute to persistence, to keeping memory alive, to referring to fundamental values in both politics and nature, and to acting despite adversity. The artist also draws attention to the fact that today, the tension between economics and ecology has again become a central conflict in society, perhaps even the cause of border disputes and wars in the near future. As Kamińska herself writes in the text accompanying the work:
And so...
here we are:
our future has become our present.
We live in a changing landscape.
Our contemporary political scene, in many ways, seems to be living up to Rosa Luxemburg’s worst fears, with its return to nationalism and increasingly exclusionary narratives. Eastern Europeans, after all, particularly affected by the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, are by no means isolated in the impression that history likes to repeat itself. Resistance to recurring evil is discussed in Familiar Strangers by the Belarussian artist Jana Shostak, the Polish-Egyptian artist Jasmina Metwaly and the Ukrainian collective Open Group (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach and Anton Varga). Metwaly, for example, translates her experience of war into a series of costumes created with her friend and designer, in collaboration with a military tailor.
