Dear all,

 

I am assisting the Polish Cultural Institute  (PCI) to organise an exhibition ('Poland Street Underground') to be shown in London in November.

 

We will probably seek to display archive material (flyers, photos, newscuttings) but right now the PCI is looking for works by Polish artists to include.  Does anyone know of any Polish artists working on surveillance/technologies of control and persuasion themes?  All suggestions welcomed,

 

 

 

This is the draft proposal for the exhibition:

 

POLAND STREET UNDERGROUND 2009

 

1984 is not  intended as an attack on Socialism... but as a show-up of the perversions ... which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. ...The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.

George Orwell

 

2009 marks the 60^th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four and the 20^th anniversary of the end of the Cold War.

Despite Orwell’s insight into the apolitical nature of the battle between freedom and repression, the post-war period between the book’s publication and the fall of the Iron Curtain was and continues to be characterized by the division of Europe into two diametrically opposed social systems: Eastern Communism and Western Capitalism.  Each championed their own as the cause of freedom and the other as its enemy.  Each had a distorted perception of the other.  In reality, similar battles between freedom and repression raged on both sides of the Iron Curtain, throughout the Cold War.

The fall of the ‘Iron Curtain’ in 1989 was originally celebrated in Poland as a victory against repression and, for a short period of time, the euphoria that swept over it was so overwhelming that most people genuinely believed that from now on, the world would become the land of the free.

In  the West,  Polish people continue to be identified as having a history of state control under Communism , instead of being recognised as part of a shared Europe.   Whereas most  Westerners are familiar with the collapse of the  Berlin Wall and its ramifications, the extent and successes of Polish resistance to the Communist  regime continue to be shielded from cultural recognition.

Taking Orwell’s novel as its inspiration, Polish Street Underground is a multi-media art exhibition that aims to dispel the cultural myths promulgated by the political elites during the Cold War.  It seeks both to incorporate Polish sub-culture within celebrated cultural revolutions of the West, and to explore the modern threats to freedom within a unified Europe, as interpreted by today’s Polish artists.