Abstract
After just a few years running, Warsaw’s Biennale says goodbye amid a wider crackdown on the creative industries in Poland.
THIS SUMMER, THE second edition of the Warsaw Biennale “Seeing Stones: Spaces Beyond the Valley” drew to a close – not just for the next two years, but for good; a victim of politics.
At the intersection of research and contemporary art, it brought together 50 international practitioners who interrogated the connections between global power structures, the digital sphere and infrastructure.
But the end of this exhibition cycle has not see the routine shift into the following curation phase that would lead to the next Biennale show two years from now – instead it marked the Warsaw Biennale’s ceasing to exist as an institution. Staff members have been clearing out the offices for months, while the space has been turned into a makeshift refugee reception centre until the contract runs out.
ABOVE & P.20: A choir takes to the streets, co-organised by the Museum of Jewish Poles. There used to be a video recording of this event, which has since been used by PiS-party affiliates out of context as evidence of the Biennale’s supposedly rogue activities
What started out as an initiative by the city of Warsaw to support contemporary art in 2017 was reversed under the same party only a few years later – the neoliberal Civic Platform (PO). The reason is national politics, specifically a scandalisation of the first edition of the Warsaw Biennale in 2019.
It involved the mayor of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski from the Civic Platform, who ran against the incumbent Andrzej Duda from the far-right Law and Justice (PiS) party as presidential candidate in 2020.
After narrowly losing the election, Trzaskowski is allegedly preparing himself for a potential second run. One thing is clear: he cannot use any bad press.
Any press is not good press
Bad press is what the Warsaw Biennale ended up costing Trzaskowski. Only weeks before the 2020 election, the national broadcaster TVP ran a piece titled: “3.6 million PLN [Polish Zloty] from Warsaw authorities for cultural institution training anarchists in ‘urban tactics’”, underscoring the agitated tone of the piece with an image that - according to reverse image search – was taken at an unrelated event. While nominally a public service station, TVP has been under political influence by the Law and Justice party since 2015.
ABOVE & OPPOSITE: Images from this year’s Biennale taken from an exhibition called Who has access?
MPs of the PiS party subsequently questioned PO in Warsaw town hall on why “Trzaskowski was breeding his rainbow militias” in central Warsaw. Even after PiS won the presidential vote, the right-wing extremist group March for Independence brought a case against Trzaskowski to the National Public Prosecutor’s Office accusing him of misconduct, making it clear the far right was not going to drop the topic.
How come the far right scandalised the Warsaw Biennale as “an element of the ‘communist international’” seeking to “overthrow by force prevailing systems”? In its first edition in 2019, the Warsaw Biennale ran under the title: “Let’s Organize Our Future!” As curator for international programmes, Anna Galas-Kosil told Index the Biennale’s focus stemmed from an observation that Polish politics was preoccupied with the opposite: “Given that the past was such a prominent topic in the political discourse, we wanted to facilitate a broader public debate on ways to imagine the future and discuss contemporary issues that we felt were important but under-served in the Polish public discourse.”
As such, within one of its four core themes, Warsaw Biennale focused on democratic grassroot activities, bringing together dozens of Polish initiatives working across migrants’ rights, women’s rights, queer rights and environmentalism. A small number of events took place under what was termed the ‘School of Anti-Capitalism’. Its objective, as stated on Warsaw Biennale’s website, was to engage with ideas about “problems of rapidly growing economic inequalities and toxic individualism”. The programme of the school reads as a critical theory-driven forum for exchanging ideas. For example, it includes a lecture by academic Simon Springer on his conception of capitalism as violent in its neoliberalisation processes.
Ironically, PiS itself successfully won a majority against the Civic Platform in 2015 precisely on an anti-neoliberal agenda. The Law and Justice-affiliated organisations and media, however, conceived of the Warsaw Biennale as a bootcamp for extremists.
The Civic Platform did not step in to defend the Warsaw Biennale, quite the contrary. In late 2020, local authorities informed the curators they wished to “shift the focus of the Biennale”. In fact, behind this shift lay its scrapping and the rebuilding of a new organisation, specifically: The Warsaw Observatory of Culture. While the Biennale curators were invited to submit a proposal of their own for a competition held in early 2021, it was clear there was no way forward for the Biennale and the objectives it was built to pursue. Galas-Kosil told Index: “At the same time, the question remained as to the need of an observatory of the cultural sector on a local scale”.
Tip of the cultural iceberg
The removal of the politically uncomfortable Warsaw Biennale is exceptional – given that it took place under the auspices of the ostensibly progressive, liberal Civic Platform in Warsaw.
However it fits into a wider trend that has affected almost all significant Warsaw cultural institutions, most of which are subordinate to the National Ministry for Culture and National Heritage: one by one, they are coming under political influence by the Law and Justice party. When it came to power in 2015, PiS initially focused on aligning other public institutions with its politico-ideological agenda, most prominently the media and the judicial system. Years later, its formerly branded ‘good changes’ have taken hold of almost all cultural institutions.
In most cases, the Ministry for Culture and National Heritage followed a specific blueprint. Months before a museum director’s contract runs out, the Ministry appoints a politically favoured successor – one with neither a reputation as cultural manager, artist or art theoretician. And there is nothing illegal about this. Appointing new directors is within its remit, even though many in the cultural sector have been advocating a merit-based public call for applications.
CREDIT: Monika Stolarska
This year, two crucial institutions came under PiS influence in this way: The National Contemporary Museum (Zacheta) in Warsaw as well as the Museum of Art (MS) in Łodź. Meanwhile, at the Centre of Contemporary Art Castle (Ujazdowski, CSW), the transformation has been underway for some time now. In late 2019, Piotr Bernatowicz was appointed its new director. Once in office, he cancelled several programmes curated by his predecessor Ludwisiak, claiming this was due to her inaccurate budgeting. Instead, the museum now had a twofold direction. First was exhibiting those who Bernatowicz viewed as previously not having been able to “exercise their creativity and freedom of speech”, including highly controversial figures like Dan Park, known for defamatory depictions of ethnic minorities and use of Nazi symbols. A second, new raison d’etre was providing an institutional framework to commemorate historic events to further a ‘Polish sense of self’. For anniversary celebrations of a victory against the Red Army in 1920, for example, the CSW organised a ‘Free World’ open air concert, to which it invited the Hungarian far right band Hungarica. It ultimately felt compelled to retreat from this decision after even the national broadcaster TVP reported on the band’s problematic affiliations.
Sneaking behind the scenes
Index exclusively spoke to Michal Matuszewski, who was cinema and film curator at Ujazdowski. During his 13 years at the institution, he witnessed three different directors. Along with a small number of colleagues, Matuszewski decided to stay on and oppose the anticipated political influence. And Bernatowicz’s taking up office in early 2020 started fairly inconspicuously. Unlike other PiS-installed directors before him – notably the controversial and noisy Miziolek at the National Museum – no one was let go. However, over the span of two years, Matuszewski said, Bernatowicz put in place a set of circumstances that practically forced Matuszewski out of his job.
Months into the new directorship, an inexperienced colleague was hired to work on a par with Matuszewski in a senior role. As daughter of Maciej Pawlicki, a film director known for his vocal PiS party line, she was trusted to follow in his ideological footsteps. After only two years, she was promoted to being Matuszewski’s supervisor, leaving him without any tasks of his own.
Matuszewski says: “It’s extremely disheartening for me to have to leave and painfully witness the sneaking, hostile takeover of yet another cultural institution of the country. At this point, there are countless examples for the mind-boggling programme choices of CSW over the past 2.5 years, only one of which we could stop. But the way in which I have had to leave – I have had to grapple with this for months – I don’t wish on anyone.”
Matuszewski has been observing Bernatowicz installing inexperienced, loyal staff across all CSW departments and suspects this to be a strategy with the goal to frustrate employees opposing the PiS-agenda.
Is PiS willingly rendering Poland’s art institutions irrelevant? Matuszewski says: “That’s not their reasoning. Those behind this takeover argue this is an emancipation project for pluralism as, allegedly, right-wing art had been censored before. But the desired result is that any perspective not aligned with the party stance should be eradicated with no trace left behind. The cultural sector is yet another battleground in ideological warfare.”
Until recently, observers feared the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN) would be next. However, it has escaped that fate for now. Unlike most Warsaw institutions, the MSN was not exclusively under the auspices of Poland’s National Cultural Ministry, but also the city of Warsaw. This May, a Warsaw City Council vote transferred the MSN exclusively to Warsaw city, meaning less funding and an overall lower profile for the institution. Speaking under condition of anonymity, someone employed at a different art institution in Warsaw told Index that they viewed this move as an act of desperation: “They cut off their arm to save themselves.”
The motivation behind this is that the Civic Platform has held a majority in Warsaw for many years. But this approach is not without risk. What if Law and Justice ever won a Warsaw election? And, the example of the Warsaw Biennale is evidence that PO is just as capable of removing cultural institutions which have become uncomfortable politically.
Co-curator Galas-Kosil told Index: “In the end, the case of the Biennale illustrates that both major parties are not too far apart in how they operate or in the role they attribute to contemporary art. Just like PiS taking over all these institutions, the PO has dismantled a contemporary art institution, just on the off chance it might cause them issues in the future. Many cities would dream of the type of intersectional discussion the Biennale provided, but this is not something that is politically desired.”