[spectre] Fwd: REPORT: Jakub Gawkowski on the rise of paranoia and populism in Poland

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Betreff: 	REPORT: Jakub Gawkowski on the rise of paranoia and populism 
in Poland
Datum: 	Sun, 04 Dec 2022 15:01:18 +0000
Von: 	art-agenda <art-agenda at mailer.e-flux.com>


What if a contemporary art center, a space usually conceived as a 
laboratory for progressive ideas, …
—REPORTS


  This Machine is Broken: the Making of Populist Contemporary Art in Warsaw
  by Jakub Gawkowski

What if a contemporary art center, a space usually conceived as a 
laboratory for progressive ideas, became the opposite: a tool for 
promoting xenophobia, exclusion, and far-right propaganda? Under 
director Piotr Bernatowicz, the once-renowned Ujazdowski Castle CCA in 
Warsaw has pivoted to align with the values of the governing, populist 
Law and Justice Party that appointed him. Its latest show, “The 
Influencing Machine,” curated by Aaron Moulton and featuring regional 
and international artists from Chris Burden to Constant Dullaart, claims 
to tell the story of how the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA) 
that sprang up across Eastern Europe in the 1990s were instruments of 
propaganda. More than anything, however, it shines a light on Polish 
nationalist populism and its conflicted, contradictory 
cultural-political mindset.

Since becoming director of Ujazdowski in 2020, Bernatowicz’s 
controversial program has sought to prove that contemporary art can be a 
place for conservative and nationalist values, and that an avant-garde 
might look back to the past, instead of forward to the future. The role 
of an experienced curatorial team in developing the program has been 
taken by loyal collaborators who not only lacked their expertise but 
even took to warning the public of the deleterious effects of 
contemporary art.(1) Thus, at the beginning of his tenure, Ujazdowski 
invited the Hungarian nationalist band Hungarica to play and cancelled 
planned events with the grassroots initiative “Anti-fascist year” while 
the non-conforming performative, discursive, and queer programming of 
previous directors has been replaced by debates with titles such as 
“Antifa against freedom” and “Culture in the European Union: a space of 
freedom or a tool for social engineering?”(2) Recent acquisitions 
include a neon by Polish artist Jacek Adamas (/Tonfa/, 2018) that, as 
the deputy director explained, alludes to the “dangers of LGBT 
ideology.”(3) Recent programming has given platforms to the Swedish 
artist Dan Park, who has previously been jailed for hate speech, and Uwe 
Max Jensen, who at the opening performed a parody of George Floyd’s 
murder in blackface accompanied by the Confederate flag (/Between the 
world and me/, 2021). This in a politically divided country in which 
women’s and LGBTQ rights are constantly being violated, and where a 
racist border regime leaves people to die in the forest.(4) In light of 
this, “The Influencing Machine”—with its international artist list and 
white-cube aesthetic—looks like a decorative way to legitimize the rest 
of the program.

The institution’s new and illiberal agenda has led to unexpected 
dialogues and alliances with the Western art world, including with 
Moulton, a Los Angeles-born former Berlin gallery owner with an interest 
in occultism. “The Influencing Machine”—a first iteration of which was 
presented at Nicodim Gallery in Bucharest in 2019—promises a critical 
reevaluation of cultural politics in the region after the fall of the 
Berlin Wall and the role of art as instrument of soft power. It’s true 
that the influence of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and other 
Western funders in shaping post-Communist Eastern Europe requires deep 
and critical examination.(5) Such a re-evaluation could initiate 
important reflections on the advent of neoliberalism in the region, the 
construction of new social and political hierarchies, and the 
distribution of economic privilege. But by focusing on George Soros as a 
figure rather than on the political and economic system of which his 
centers were part, or on the institutional ecology which they produced 
in the region, the exhibition becomes little more than a pawn in the 
culture wars and an attempt to position the reactionary politics of 
Ujazdowski’s program in an international intellectual context.

Through works from the 1990s to the present that touch upon the 
relations between art, economy, and politics, as well as a few pieces 
directly connected to the history of SCCA and a handful of archival 
materials and interviews, the exhibition balances a critical analysis of 
the mission of “the SCCA Network” with a deep-dive into the 
conspiratorial thinking that today surrounds it. It tries to be witty 
and postmodern by relativizing notions of truth and power—“all 
exhibitions are propaganda,” the text reads—and then goes on to conflate 
Soros’s inspiration by Karl Popper’s vision of an “open society” with 
the caricature of him as a great manipulator who by promoting diversity 
and multiculturalism seeks to annihilate traditional society.(6)

The exhibition’s main problem is that those positions are neither 
symmetrical nor in good faith. The supposedly politically neutral 
curatorial position—arguing that art is always “used to control 
society,” without saying to what end this particular exhibition is 
working—the fascination with New Age aesthetics and network theory, and 
a collection of portraits of Soros displayed at the center of the show, 
might have made for a relatively harmless provocation somewhere else. 
But not in the Ujazdowski and not now, as the Polish government curtails 
the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community. One wonders whether 
participating artists such as Christian Jankowski and Eva and Franco 
Mattes are aware of the context in which their work is displayed (next, 
for example, to the antisemitic conspiracy theorist David Dees). While 
some of the Western artists might conceivably be ignorant of the 
situation in Poland and the toxicity of this project, the presence of 
artists from the region such as János Brückner, Anetta Mona Chisa and 
Lucia Tkacova, and Ciprian Mureșan is more troubling.

The show makes a connection between the socially engaged artistic 
practices nourished by the SCCA and the neoliberal market, in which the 
former created the space for the latter. The curator refers to the 
exhibition’s mission in terms of decolonization, but it is he who comes 
with colonial assumptions: contemporary art existed in the region before 
SCCA funding enabled a generation of artists and curators to develop 
their own projects and ideas in context-specific ways, from Budapest to 
Almaty. To claim that a generation of Eastern Europeans has been 
manipulated to serve a foreign agenda to facilitate economic 
transformation, and not because of their own historical experiences, 
convictions, and practices—such as the local histories of unofficial art 
which SCCA researched—is to treat these cultural workers as if they had 
no agency over their own destinies. It’s especially strange to present 
this in Poland, where the Soros-funded Foundation for Contemporary Art 
existed only for two years without realizing any substantial projects: 
most of the country’s radical art after the economic transformation was 
presented either by grassroots initiatives or in public, state-funded 
institutions, including the Ujazdowski.

While Soros’s influence in the region, as with every philanthropic 
Western presence, can and should be analyzed in relation to forms of 
neoliberal soft power—and I write this as an alumnus of the Soros-funded 
Central European University in Budapest—the materials gathered here are 
not substantial enough to do so. The exhibition proudly claims to 
include “a large archive about the entire SCCA network that allows 
first-time research,” but much more thorough research on the subject 
already exists; some of these books are even displayed next to the 
“archive.” Some things seem directly to contradict the show’s thesis. An 
interview in which Suzy Meszoly, executive director of the Soros 
Foundation turned spiritual healer, talks about her relationship with 
Soros goes little way towards helping viewers understand the economic 
context of his network. More than that, her suggestion that it was she 
who convinced Soros of the importance of contemporary art, thus 
initiating the creation of the SCCAs, undermines the assertion that the 
network is the expression of some grand propagandizing masterplan by the 
Hungarian-American businessman. The exhibition seems led by cynicism and 
prejudice rather than research.

It was the ruthless free-market neoliberalism fueled by the West in the 
1990s, and the frustration of those it left behind, that allowed 
populists to gain power across the region, and the world, in the 2010s. 
But this show does not even attempt critically to revise this history. 
Instead, we are confronted with multiple portrayals of Soros by, among 
others, Adrian Ghenie, Şerban Savu, Hortensia Mi Kafchin and Jon 
McNaughton, making him and his appearance—and not his financial or 
political agenda—the focus. It is not irrelevant that Soros, who is 
Jewish, is presented as financier mastermind of some vast conspiracy in 
a country troubled by historical and contemporary antisemitism. While in 
Hungary Viktor Orbán’s government has set up Soros as a hate figure 
(playing on antisemitic sentiment), he is not particularly well-known in 
Poland, so it’s tempting to conclude that the show in Ujazdowski has 
nothing to do with revisiting the past or even the present, but rather 
with creating a narrative. Populism feeds on a fundamental opposition 
between “good people” and a demonized “elite,” and that’s why both 
conspiracy and New Age spirituality fit into the picture here—the world 
reduced to a cosmic struggle between good and evil.

In the Polish art community, discussion of this weak and confused 
exhibition has been almost nonexistent due to the widespread 
unwillingness to give any attention to Bernatowicz’s program. Not only 
that, but with the war in Ukraine, humanitarian crisis on the 
Polish-Belarusian border, and the accelerating economic crisis, another 
lousy attack on the ideas of Open Society and George Soros feels 
outdated regardless of what side of the culture war you are on. The 
façade of Ujazdowski displays a Polish flag above the entrance, and two 
huge prints on its sides that refer to the invasion of Poland by Germany 
and Russia in 1939. Playing on historical sentiment and adopting the 
role of victim are common strategies for the nationalist right in 
Poland, which likes to insist that it is threatened by both Moscow and 
Berlin (or, rather, Brussels). And yet the commitment of these seemingly 
anti-Putinist figures to fighting the “moral corruption” of the West, 
and its use of conspiratorial arguments to justify its illiberal, 
xenophobic, and anti-LGBTQ position, only aligns them with the views of 
the Kremlin.


(1) Curator Krystyna Różańska-Gorgolewska speaking on Telewizja wPolsce 
as part of a discussion entitled "Modern Art. How does it affect young 
people?" in November 2020 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=464&v=sflAvS8kTjM&feature=emb_title 
<https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/yt3230509s1e5/track-url/tp12937jyq133/46949a3ca0d6b03ad7eaf241492a8a2d8ac3ec75>
(2) Hungarica’s concert was boycotted and cancelled after a backlash. 
For the statement from “The Anti-fascist year” see: “Open letter of The 
Anti-fascist Year regarding censorship at the Centre for Contemporary 
Art Ujazdowski Castle,” L'Internationale Online (March 2020), 
https://www.internationaleonline.org/opinions/1009_open_letter_of_the_anti_fascist_year_regarding_censorship_at_the_centre_for_contemporary_art_ujazdowski_castle/ 
<https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/yt3230509s1e5/track-url/tp12937jyq133/cccd2825fe8ec8e04d8a0bac0fd2fe6b9ff87bba>.
(3) “In Poland Museum Director’s Anti-gay Acquisition, Critics Find 
Ominous Portent,” /Artforum/ (September 2020), 
https://www.artforum.com/news/in-poland-museum-director-s-antigay-acquisition-critics-find-ominous-portent-83916 
<https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/yt3230509s1e5/track-url/tp12937jyq133/e257e868f71c141beae577cde8db370c3a06adce>.
(4) “Poland starts building wall through protected forest at Belarus 
border,” /The Guardian/ (January 2022), 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/27/poland-starts-building-wall-through-protected-forest-at-belarus-border 
<https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/yt3230509s1e5/track-url/tp12937jyq133/8ead96e743537b16b05f3d5e4bce97a1d8016df9>.
(5) Open Society Foundations (OSF) was created as Open Society Institute 
in 1993 by George Soros to support his foundations in Central and 
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in advancing justice, 
education, public health, and independent media. Today, OSF is a 
grantmaking network active in more than 120 countries around the world. 
The group's name was inspired by Karl Popper's 1945 book /The Open 
Society and Its Enemies/. See: “The Open Society Foundations and George 
Soros,” Open Society Foundations (December 2020), 
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/newsroom/open-society-foundations-and-george-soros 
<https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/yt3230509s1e5/track-url/tp12937jyq133/5b18a6ae63fdcf246f06c134349d1a252373b76e>.
(6) “The Influencing Machine,” Ujazdowski, 
https://u-jazdowski.pl/en/programme/exhibitions/maszyna-wplywu 
<https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/yt3230509s1e5/track-url/tp12937jyq133/38c83384d777d50bc20a8018ffb3d48dcc786f26>.

*Jakub Gawkowski *is a curator and art historian who works at the Muzeum 
Sztuki in Łódź.

RECENT FEATURES Arrow Right 
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MORE FROM JAKUB GAWKOWSKI Arrow Right 
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