S

The installation discusses the three entities that at different historical moments had the fantasy of Madagascar as a Polish colony: ‘Beniowski’, ‘Maritime and Colonial League’, and ‘Janek Simon.’

In the interwar period, Poland – following the example of Western powers – aspired to own colonies. Polish attempts included, among others, Madagascar. The main agent of these activities was the, the publisher of the monthly magazine, Morze [Sea]. In 2006, Janek Simon came across an issue of this publication at an antique shop. The fascination with discovering the scope of Polish ambitions to ‘catch up’ with the West compounded the artist’s disappointment with the instrumentalization of art by Polish cultural diplomacy, which he experienced as a participant of international projects. In this way, the idea for the Polish Year in Madagascar project was born.

In the spring of 2006, Janek Simon travelled to the capital of Madagascar, Antananarivo, with a suitcase full of artworks with the aim of organizing a Polish exhibition — a mockery of official government cultural events. Yet, paradoxically, Simon’s suitcase contained no artworks by Polish artists.

Janek Simon managed to combine the repressed memories of colonial ambitions with a double absence: the lack of a Polish colony in Madagascar and Polish artists at the ‘Polish Year’ exhibition. The artist examines the ideas of Polishness in various ways, confronting visions of magnitude with hang-ups and failures. He breaks the linear story of the colonization of the South-East by the North-West and undermines the divisions into the centre and periphery, victim and executioner, rewriting history textbooks and contemporary postcolonial studies literature.

The video is inspired by Olga Boznańska. Swinarska focused on the painter’s work clothes, an old-fashioned, 19th-century dress and an apron. She rented a similar one from the theatre and arranged her own room to resemble Boznańska’s studio in Paris.

Playing the part of Boznańska, Swinarska says that the dress adds momentum and that thanks to it her gestures become more expressive, emphasizing the importance of the dress in building the artist-painter identity and the medium of painting itself, deemed irrelevant by the contemporary art world. The dress becomes a symbol of the conventional language of images — simultaneously attractive and out-dated.

The installation documents the transformations in the area of the former Gdańsk Shipyard, perceived as the place of birth, boom, and decline of the ‘Solidarity’ workers’ movement and an example of the thriving shipbuilding industry. For a number of years (1999-2013), Szlaga recorded the progressing destruction of the shipyard. He photographed the architectural transformations, the devastation of grand, and 19th-century brick buildings, such as the Director’s Villa with a library, as a symbol of the decline of the culture and intellectual thought that had been present since the establishment of the shipyard. The muted colours and expertly composed landscapes and portraits are a symbolic record of Poland’s transformation, the wasted human potential and painful processes of change that took place in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe.

The work consists of three individual elements in the form of the letters S, O, and S, shaped from welded sheet metal and filled with metal and wood scraps and fragments of equipment collected from the Gdańsk Shipyard.

This work is a repository of material remnants of the shipyard’s heritage, a material document of protest and social mobilization, expressed with the use of seemingly redundant remainders of a declining workplace. While it was created as a monument-sculpture, the piece also serves as an object for community activities, an example of which was rolling it around the buildings in the degraded post-industrial areas.

The performance consists of choreography and sounds created by shipyard workers, directed by Wollny and Szwajgier. The authors of the compositions use similarities between the structure of the working day and the typical structure of a song. Fragments of free time are distinguished from parts of the work, just as verses can be separated from choruses. The free time (verses) is subtle, soothing and kind of disappears in space — with fragments of conversations, playing ping-pong, and opening beer cans. The refrains (work) are loud, with relentless sounds of metal objects, light and heavy-duty tools, sounds of grinding and welding (and the accompanying almost baroque sparks of light) that fill the entire hall. Through their performance, the men furnish the memory of the shipyard with a bodily dimension, in which sound becomes the carrier of memories.

Wollny, who typically incorporates the local context (both architecture and people) into her compositions, constructs an interesting tension between the labour of the workers that results in a material practical object (for example a ship), and an artistic work whose product is a work of art. In this case, both work and free time become activities that have succumbed equally to capitalist rule.