Creolizing/kinkifying the 'Oriental Baroque': Tatar Nomadism and a Preposterous History of Polish Contemporary Art

• In Event: Cosmologies, Affects, Allyships: Decolonial Resonances in Polish Contemporary Art

Abstract

The presentation outlines visitations of Tatar nomadism in Polish contemporary art, which haunt the vision of linear time and of a monocultural Polish of history, affording instead opportunities for speculative cosmos-building and spectral incorporations. The paper shall draw a preposterous art history (in the sense of Mieke Bal) linking neo-avantgarde practices in the Polish People’s Republic in the 1970s, emergent in the conditions of the so-called “Real Socialism”, to contemporary Polish art—explicitly invoking Polish-Tatar cosmology and magical practices. While the former creolize the colonial “Long Baroque” of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by operationalising its Tatar, Ottoman, and Persian elements, alongside its mythology of Eastness (Sarmatism); the latter more closely focus on the Polish northeast region of Podlasie and its entangled intercultural inscriptions. Rather than capturing nomadic objects as static forms while essentialising its authors, these artistic hauntings elaborate a processual ontology of the nomadic image.
The first part of the presentation will perform a case study of 1970s practices by Polish neo-avant-garde intermedia performance artist Marek Konieczny (1936–2022) inspired by blockbuster filmic adaptations of Polish-Tatar epic writer Henryk Sienkiewicz’s (1846¬–1916) Trilogy series set in a seventeenth-century Poland. As will be argued, Konieczny’s spectral incorporations queer the history of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and (ab)use the anachronism of its "Oriental Baroque," to borrow the term from historian Adam Zamoyski, for kinky purposes. The second part will interrogate how contemporary practices of performative self-Orientalisation undertaken Polish Tatars are operationalized in local collaborative artistic and musical projects in the Podlachia region.

Author

• Radek Przedpelski, Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)