Cosmologies, Affects, Allyships: Decolonial Resonances in Polish Contemporary Art

Session Submission Type: Panel

Affiliate Organization: Society of Historians of East European and Russian Art & Architecture

Brief Description

The panel explores ways in which contemporary Polish art has engaged with the issues of decoloniality, both within the intra-regional context of the legacies of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and serfdom and by building transversal allyships with artistic practices in the “Global South.” Eastern Europe will be considered in terms of Manuela Boatcă emphasis on creolisation and Kasia Narkowicz’s concept of “peripheral whiteness.” The presentations in this panel interrogate various ways in which Polish contemporary artistic practices explore the potentialities of their media to decolonise West-centric chronopolitics by exposing the archival mode of knowledge as the Mbembian porous “fissile material;” by activating the powers of creolization, haunting, fabulation, affect, hapticity and heterogenous temporal scales; as well as by initiating dialogues and building communities of practice with artists from the “Global South.” Emphasis will be made on how art becomes a vehicle for tackling historical traumas by instituting different modes of spectrality in accordance to Polish queer literature scholar Maria Janion’s (1926-2020) motto “To Europe yes, but only with our dead.” This comparativist art-historical panel extends the decolonial gesture of bypassing West-centric Anglophone art history and instead will focus on parallels between the relevant modes of artistic invention between eastern Europe and various regions in the “Global South.”

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Katarzyna Jezowska, U of New South Wales (Australia)

Papers

• Depicting the Past Futures: An Artistic Engagement with Post-Colonial and Post-Authoritarian Contexts - Katarzyna Cytlak, Nicolaus Copernicus U (Poland)

• Rhizomatic Sisterhoods: Fiber, Folk, and the Decolonial Feminine in Contemporary Art - Julia Stachura, Adam Mickiewicz U (Poland)

• Creolizing/kinkifying the 'Oriental Baroque': Tatar Nomadism and a Preposterous History of Polish Contemporary Art - Radek Przedpelski, Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)

Discussant

• Ksenya Gurshtein, Independent Scholar

Session Manager

• A. M. LaVey, New York Public Library