Visual dialogue with racist images of blackness in Poland: On seeing historically

Abstract

The article examines contemporary visual artworks and examples of activism, which undertake a silent, wordless dialogue with long-lasting historical anti-Black stereotypes in Poland. First, drawing from the visual culture studies, it proves that the racializing recognition also has its memory—that the ways of seeing, in this case “seeing race,” are historical, complex and saturated with the past. Thus, here the dialogic remembering will not designate a clash of two (or more) visions of history, which are impossible to reconcile. Through knowledge of historical, often forgotten representations of distant, exoticized Otherness, contemporary artists—Rafał Milach, Zbigniew Libera, or Janek Simon among others—conduct an archeology of this formula of vision in Poland—a country with no history of colonialism or Black slavery and thus often regarding itself as free of anti-Black racism. Their work—in different media: photography, oil painting, installations—constitutes a distinct type of visual dialogue aimed at acknowledging and undermining the presence and persistence of historical formulas in the contemporary eye. Understood as an artistic tactic in the visual field, dialogic remembering will need to take into account the dialogic character of seeing itself. The conflict under consideration will be waged not between rival visions of the past, but within a historicized way of seeing.