Cur(at)ing History

Abstract

In the past few decades, Poland has seen a growing number of attempts to reclaim its Jewish past through traditional forms such as historiographic revision, heritage preservation, and monument building. But a unique new mode of artistic, performative, often participatory "memory work" has been emerging alongside these conventional forms, growing in its prevalence and increasingly catching the public eye. This new genre of memorial intervention is characterized by its fast-moving, youthful, innovative forms and nontraditional venues and its socially appealing, dialogic, and digitally networked character as opposed to a prior generation of top-down, slow moving, ethnically segregated, mono-vocal styles. It also responds to the harsh historical realities brought to light by scholars of the Jewish-Polish past with a mandate for healing. This article maps the landscape of this new genre of commemoration projects, identifying their core features and investigating their anatomy via three case studies: Rafał Betlejewski's I Miss You Jew!; Public Movement's Spring in Warsaw; and Yael Bartana's Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland. Analyzing their temporalities, scopes, modalities and ambiences, as well as the new visions for mutual identification and affiliation that they offer Poles and Jews, we approach these performances not as representations, but rather as embodied experiences that stage and invite participation in "repertoires" of cultural memory. Different from simple reenactments, this new approach may be thought of as a subjunctive politics of history-a "what if" proposition that plays with reimagining and recombining a range of Jewish and Polish memories, present-day realities, and future aspirations.

Duality of Decolonizing: Artists’ Memory Activism in Warsaw

“…Although the term "memory activism" has seldom been explicitly applied to artistic practices, the growing literature on art, performance and commemoration around the globe provides important hints on how it may be used in this context (e.g., Kennedy and Graefenstein 2019;von Bieberstein and Evren 2016;Lehrer and Waligórska 2013;Liedeke and Smelik 2013;Till 2008). This article draws on this literature to conceptualize artists' memory activism as a cultural practice that enacts the past to generate alternative processes of memory that challenge its dominant regimes, conceived of, in turn, as hegemonic discursive and esthetic ways of interpreting past events.…”

Memorialising the (Un)Dead Jewish Other in Poland: Spectrality, Embodiment and Polish Holocaust Horror in Władysław Pasikowski’s Aftermath (2012)

“…Mirroring the belated resurfacing of trauma, haunting thus has to do with 'the past's sudden and uncanny interruption or disruption of the present' (Gordon 2008). In conjuring the Jewish undead to make the circumstances of their murder and dispossession known, Polish Holocaust horror signifies an intervention into a memorial landscape characterised by what Erica Lehrer has called 'traditional and divisive historiography' prior to the last two decades, in which Jewish Holocaust narratives were obscured and subsumed by dominant Polish ones (Lehrer 2013).…”

“…Planted in Józef's field (see Figure 3), these matzevot draw attention to the unmarked ravines and fields containing Jewish bodily remains in rural Poland, which for Sendyka require a change in nomenclature from mass graves to Józef's protection of the stones is motivated, however, by a largely ineffable and internalised moral drive. The motif of the returning Jew has been branded 'elitist' by some scholars, like Lehrer, in the knowledge it assumes of its viewer about the complexities surrounding national debates over wartime Polish conduct, and the place of such debates in contemporary Polish culture (Lehrer 2013). Józef's inability to express his incentive for protecting the stones other than through a feeling that he 'had to', however, is simple (Pasikowski 2012).…”