The BWA Contemporary art gallery

‘History is inspiring because through events that have already occurred, one can talk about the present’ – after all, as we know, history is the teacher of life. Artists have dealt with history since time immemorial. Thanks to their literary or pictorial representations – poems and chronicles, engravings, paintings and finally movies – our imagination is populated, facts sparkle with colours and resound with words. Artistic works contribute to historical memory alongside the testimonies, documents and factual descriptions of professional historians. Artists, like scouts, venture into the past, unfettered by academic discourse or the ideological correctness of official interpretations and the shoals of pedagogical precepts.

‘History is no longer a play written by a single philosopher, a single Party or a powerful State’ – said Octavo Paz. ‘There is no such thing as »natural destiny«; no nation, no class has a monopoly on the future, plots and protagonists change constantly. History is a daily discovery, a constant continuity – it is a hypothesis, a risky game, a challenge thrown to the incalculable. Not a science, but a knowledge; not a technique, rather an art’.

This risky game with history, especially the history of the 20th century, is played by artists from different positions.

In an unprecedented way, the Second World War became an extremely important element in the process of these creative explorations. In the artistic practice of Polish (and other) artists – those born before the war, Holocaust survivors and Holocaust witnesses – appear works indicating the presence of war trauma, as well as the impossibility of rendering it through the visual means used so far. The experience of war created a conflict between the desire to show the truth, to bear witness to events, and the awareness of the incompatibility of traditional pictorial conventions, as well as the inadequacy of the hitherto existing language of art to portray trauma. The generation of artists born after the war is already crossing the boundaries of art set by the war generation. The temporal distance allows for a more critical view, a widening of the field of vision and a look not only at the victims, but also at the perpetrators. In the 1990s, when the model of mourning art was run-down, there was a kind of retreat from sanctification towards commemoration and innovation. Today, artists have a need to constantly reconstruct the past, to evoke and reinterpret it and its representations for the present. They are moving away from solemnity and the poetics of silence to an interdisciplinary artistic practice; it is narrative, polyphonic, metaphorical, enigmatic and ambiguous. Their approach can be understood as a kind of self-consciousness that always makes one relate the events of the Second World War to the context of their representation in the present. Artists born after the war belong to what historians call the ‘second generation’. They have no direct memory of events related to the war or the Holocaust. The memory of this generation is referred to as ‘post-memory’ – the ‘memory of witnesses’ creating a ‘punctured memory’. ‘Post-memory’ characterises the experience of those who have grown up and are growing up in a world dominated by narratives relating to a time before their birth. Their belated histories are dominated by those of previous generations, shaped by traumatic events that can neither be understood nor reconstructed. The trauma caused by war poses a constant emotional and intellectual challenge for these artists.
[…]
The exhibition will be opened on the eve of the 85th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War

Jan Trzupek — part of main text

Artists
Mirosław Bałka, Siergiej Czajka, Hubert Czerepok, Krzysztof Gil, Marta Ignerska, Artur Klinaú, Zbigniew Libera, Little Warsaw, Krzysztof Piętka, Wilhelm Sasnal, Witold Stelmachniewicz, Grzegorz Sztwiertnia, Wojciech Wilczyk

Curator
Jan Trzupek

The vernissage will begin at 6 pm on 2 August 2024.
The exhibition will run until 22 September 2024.