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<td>REPORT: Jakub Gawkowski on the rise of paranoia and
populism in Poland</td>
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<td>Sun, 04 Dec 2022 15:01:18 +0000</td>
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<th valign="BASELINE" nowrap="nowrap" align="RIGHT">Von: </th>
<td>art-agenda <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:art-agenda@mailer.e-flux.com"><art-agenda@mailer.e-flux.com></a></td>
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<span class="preheader"
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<div style="font-size: 11px;
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<h1 class="mobile-text-headline"
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This Machine is Broken: the
Making of Populist Contemporary
Art in Warsaw <br>
<span style="color:#aaa;">by
Jakub Gawkowski</span></h1>
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<p>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. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>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 (<i>Tonfa</i>, 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 (<i>Between
the world and me</i>, 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.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>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)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><br>
(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 <a
href="https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/yt3230509s1e5/track-url/tp12937jyq133/46949a3ca0d6b03ad7eaf241492a8a2d8ac3ec75"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=464&v=sflAvS8kTjM&feature=emb_title</a><br>
(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), <a
href="https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/yt3230509s1e5/track-url/tp12937jyq133/cccd2825fe8ec8e04d8a0bac0fd2fe6b9ff87bba"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.internationaleonline.org/opinions/1009_open_letter_of_the_anti_fascist_year_regarding_censorship_at_the_centre_for_contemporary_art_ujazdowski_castle/</a>.<br>
(3) “In Poland Museum Director’s
Anti-gay Acquisition, Critics Find
Ominous Portent,” <em>Artforum</em>
(September 2020), <a
href="https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/yt3230509s1e5/track-url/tp12937jyq133/e257e868f71c141beae577cde8db370c3a06adce"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.artforum.com/news/in-poland-museum-director-s-antigay-acquisition-critics-find-ominous-portent-83916</a>.<br>
(4) “Poland starts building wall through
protected forest at Belarus border,” <em>The
Guardian</em> (January 2022), <a
href="https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/yt3230509s1e5/track-url/tp12937jyq133/8ead96e743537b16b05f3d5e4bce97a1d8016df9"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/27/poland-starts-building-wall-through-protected-forest-at-belarus-border</a>.<br>
(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 <em>The Open
Society and Its Enemies</em>. See:
“The Open Society Foundations and George
Soros,” Open Society Foundations
(December 2020), <a
href="https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/yt3230509s1e5/track-url/tp12937jyq133/5b18a6ae63fdcf246f06c134349d1a252373b76e"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/newsroom/open-society-foundations-and-george-soros</a>.<br>
(6) “The Influencing Machine,”
Ujazdowski, <a
href="https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/yt3230509s1e5/track-url/tp12937jyq133/38c83384d777d50bc20a8018ffb3d48dcc786f26"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://u-jazdowski.pl/en/programme/exhibitions/maszyna-wplywu</a>.<br>
</p>
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<p><strong>Jakub Gawkowski </strong>is a
curator and art historian who works at
the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.</p>
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