Gdansk Collection of Contemporary Art, a deposit of the City of Gdansk in the collection of NOMUS – New Art Museum, Branch of the National Museum in Gdansk
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. Instead, it featured artworks by the Czech group Guma Guar, the Romanian Vlad Nancy, the Bulgarians Binder, referring to the problems of Poland during the transformation period: the growth of nationalism, the decline of the public space, as well as mass consumption and Poland's participation in the Iraq War — as if resurrecting Polish dreams of belonging to the Western elites.
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.