Community Think Tank

Although the currently used words cannot be replaced entirely, it is a pretext for a discussion on an important problem, and this is what matters the most in the work. I want to show that we are all “nowacy”. “nowak” [the word proposed by Jana to replace “refugee” and “Nowak” [the second most popular surname in Poland] are homonyms, and thus they can serve to convey that ultimately we are all people. They can bring us back to the old truth: we are all people.

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In order to promote the word I decided to participate in the Miss Polonia beauty pageant. First, I took part in regional contests and I am now making my way up the beauty pageant hierarchy. My goal is to go as far as I can – to the semi-final and the final, which are transmitted live on television with up to 4 million viewers. I already took part in such a contest in Belarus when I was 17, and then I used Belarussian language a lot, which is seen either as a sign of opposition to the country’s political regime or one’s rural roots. I even reached a high position, but I resigned because I started my studies in Cracow. Now I want to participate again to tap into the media attention and symbolic capital that it offers to promote the word “nowak”, take it outside the art world and detach it from myself as an artist and author of the project, to smuggle the idea as a kind of “product placement”. Besides, such contests claim to focus not only on beauty, but also wisdom and engagement, so I want to check if the latter is indeed considered seriously as a condition in succeeding.

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Your projects, such as Nowacy seem very much immersed in specific (Polish) contexts. How do you perceive the question of such contextualisation. When you talk about your art abroad, do you feel you need to add many footnotes to convey what you mean? On the other hand, you’ve recently stayed for longer in Rotterdam. Did you also feel like finding loopholes into the reality there?

 

The point of departure is my sincere engagement in the place where I am and I’m very keen on working with contexts that I notice on an everyday basis. My art is a kind of site-specific practice, very much contextualised by the place, or in this case, by the socio-political situation in given places.

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As for talking about my art, in the case of Nowacy, if you don’t know that it is by far one of the most popular surnames, then the story does not trigger as much of an emotional engagement. But I felt that people reacted as if they understood what I meant. I also try to explain it in possibly the simplest and most accessible way. As for Nowacy, I think it might also work in different countries given the fact that it refers to the old truth that we are all people.

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When I was saying that the Polish word for “refugee” has become pejoratively understood in Poland, I sometimes heard that it also does not have particularly positive connotations in English, depending of course on who you’re talking to. Even Agamben wrote about a sense of temporariness that surrounds the word, which does not connote positive things. But the particularly negative meaning that the Polish society has given to it recently is very hard to explain. It is generally very hard to fully convey what you mean, but I try at least to draw a certain outline.

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When you try to understand what is going on somewhere, you need to go there and live there for a longer while to see the things that are wrong in a given reality. The more time you spend there, the better you see all those micro-differences between places. That’s why you need to be physically present to situate yourself in a given space and time.

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While being in Rotterdam I began the first stage of investigating the local problems and what struck me was the feast of St. Nicholas celebrations that feature the Black Peter character. Once a year people paint their faces black. The celebrations are somewhat of a postcolonial remnant and, as such, they stir controversy and confront people with a dilemma: participating in a holiday celebrated on a national scale while realising at the same time that it involves a blackface issue. But I think it would take at least a year of living there to explore the problem in detail, to see what it really looks like. It definitely takes time.

 

What does the “effectiveness” of art mean in your opinion. How do you perceive the “effectiveness” of your own projects – what are its indicators?

 

I’d like to reach the level of effectiveness of art on which information about the works is not sent by the artist to the viewer, but comes to the artist from the viewers. That’s why I think the true effectiveness of art lies beyond the art world – it cannot be determined, it cannot be squeezed in the frames of the art world. It is also never entirely known what such effectiveness means – when art projects begin to have an influence and on what levels, including those that were not originally intended by the artist. It also takes time to gauge the effectiveness of something. If something resonates with the emotions of people from outside the art world, such as taxi drivers, maybe that’s what true effectiveness is about. I talk about my works in taxis and I observe the reactions of the drivers, even if they initially claim to know nothing about art.

 

How do you see the role of the curator in the development of your projects and getting them across to the public?

 

I might not yet have such a big experience, I am not represented by any commercial gallery. For now, I’m most involved in collaborations in the art academy sphere and to an increasing degree in art institutions. I think curators who engage with the development of the work play the role of a mentor. In the majority of my works, the only curator was my mentor from the academy, whose role was similar to a curator.  I think that’s one of the reasons why institutions are needed – to practice this kind of relationship between the artist and the curator or the professor, viewed as a mentor, but not as a master.

Because what matters is collaboration – when you share your idea with someone close or with someone from outside the art world, just as I like to talk about my art with taxi drivers, then what matters is a healthy equal relation, mutual respect despite the difference in age, profession, tastes. Of course, this does not work with everybody.

At the beginning of studies we ran a gallery in which we not only exhibited our own work but sometimes took the role of curators. And I think it is always good to get a sense of both sides – to see what it’s like to be an artist and a curator. You need to put yourself in certain roles to see how others around you work.

With Nowacy, I also feel like a curator in a certain way, because many people around me worked on it. I have built something like a mycelium to make it possible for the mushroom in the form of this word to appear on the surface. That’s my metaphor – the mycelium, the roots are never visible, it seems that the mushroom grows on its own, but it happens thanks to the entire system which is invisible. I think the relation between the curator and the artist can be compared to such a system, which needs to involve collaboration on an equal level. Having said this, I also think that sometimes you need to maintain a certain balance and make sure you work on something that was initiated by you as an artist – to keep the curator from having too much of an influence, to preserve your autonomy.

Considering the presentation of works, as I’ve said I want to hear about my projects from people from outside the art world, and that’s why I need to make sure that my stories are as simple as possible and conveyed already at the level of the work, and not in the accompanying text or during a guided tour. Curatorial framing of my works presents a certain challenge – how to approach the aesthetic aspect in a situation where most of my works do not have a strong aesthetic layer, they exist mainly at the level of concepts. That’s why I try to develop a system to talk about them in possibly the simplest way – not only through a printed text, but an animated text. For example, during the current exhibition at WRO I realised that text panels are not as attractive as, for instance, computer print screens in which you can trace how the text comes into being, how new layers are added to it. That’s how I try to capture the viewer’s attention, especially now that attention spans are shrinking and you need the shortest and the most appealing ways to convey something.

After one of the exhibitions that did not have as much of a resonance, I said half-jokingly that next time I expect a curator or an institution to officially commit to social media activity. There are many creative ways to hack into the social media system that institutions and curators don’t use. So my vision of a curator is someone who can engage in a clever online activity towards promoting the work. Building the form and framing the content of an exhibition is important, but equally important is engagement in the further dissemination of that form and content. I would like curators to take such challenges.