A Visual Memory For The Visual Missing Memory (Raffael-Scherrer)
«We cannot turn back the history clock and bring back to life a world that has been destroyed, but we can return to it in a symbolic space – through the polyphony of exhibitions in various parts in Poland and through a variety of creative actions. » [1]
The negotiation of Jewish heritage and the Jewish past in Poland through contemporary art is a multifaceted and profoundly significant process. Contemporary art serves not merely as a medium for representation but as a dynamic platform for discussion, confrontation, healing, and the filling of profound memory voids, offering new perspectives on a complex and often contested past.
Discussion and Negotiation
One of the primary roles of (visual) art in the context of Jewish remembrance in Poland is its capacity to create a unique platform for dialogue and negotiation regarding the past, particularly the contested history of Jewish people in Poland during the Second World War. Art allows these discussions and confrontations to transcend their usual arenas and enter new contexts, thereby adding fresh perspectives.
It offers a way to not only display the past from a contemporary viewpoint but also to negotiate how this past has influenced and continues to influence the present. As Haviva Pedaya [2] states, art can “resist the space-time viewpoints and make present simultaneously all spaces and times, in order to unfreeze them”. This suggests art's ability to collapse temporal distances, making historical trauma and memory immediately relevant and palpable.
What are the roles of traditional museums and contemporary art spaces in this endeavor? While history/historic museums, such as the Galicia Jewish Museum, primarily aim to show the past, inform, preserve and help remember, contemporary art spaces like the BWA Gallery of Modern Art in Tarnow might open new ways to deal with the past through the medium of art. Museums perform crucial work in preserving Jewish heritage and acknowledging historical problems, but their approach can sometimes lead to the perception that the certain pasts are rather left in the past. This might be a controversially opinion – but while in Poland there was a perceived hesitation when people talked about the past in relation to Jewish heritage. During our visit at the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, the head of the education department, Maciek Zabierowski, mentioned the influence of the Polish ministry of culture on the cultural policy – could these interventions have added pressure on institutions being monitored while trying to negotiate the past? Especially in the eight years of the PiS government, the party reshaped Poland's cultural landscape, and made it difficult to discuss the polish complicity on a legal basis. [3] Their core policy aimed to implement an affirmative, heroic, and martyrological historical narrative, emphasizing Polish resistance and suffering while excluding or denying ambivalent past elements like Polish violence against Jews or anti-communist attacks on minorities. They also rejected critical engagement with socio-political issues like gender and LGBTQ+ rights, viewing them as "left-wing Western" impositions. This perspective was enforced across cultural sectors, particularly through a dual strategy: promoting aligned institutions and artists and taking control of central institutions perceived as contrary to their views. [4]
Whereas the new government elected in 2023 started to reverse the significant interventions by the PiS party into the cultural scene some remnants arguably are still noticeable.
Coming back to contemporary art spaces – though not typically visited with the explicit intention of confronting the Jewish past, can nonetheless engage audiences in profound ways precisely because they are not primarily dedicated historical institutions. This unexpected encounter can lead to a deeper, more personal engagement with a difficult subject matter.
Remembrance and Confrontation
The BWA Gallery of Modern Art in Tarnow serves as a prime example of how a contemporary art space negotiates Jewish heritage. Located in the neo-gothic Strzelecki Palace, formerly a shooting club, it positions itself within the social space between art and the local culture, engaging with its surroundings, including the local Roma community and Tarnow’s Jewish heritage. Its exhibitions often create a link between past and present, or display history and futures through contemporary art [5].
Starting point of my interest was the exhibition THE COLD EYE, which illustrated the frame of the excursion. The exhibition documented a 1941 project by two scientists to research “typical Eastern Jews” through photographs of 565 Jewish individuals in German-occupied Tarnow. The well-curated historic accounting was shown at the BWA, a space dedicated to contemporary art. This juxtaposition of a historical, “museal” exhibition within a contemporary art context immediately raised questions about how history and contemporary art can be combined to, in the excursion’s context, artistically negotiate Jewish memory. This particular exhibition highlights the potential of contemporary art spaces to challenge conventional modes of historical presentation and to foster a more immediate, perhaps even unsettling, confrontation with the past.
Several artists and their works exemplify the BWA's approach to the Jewish past – Tadeusz Kantor's performative installation THE DEAD CLASS explores the impossibility of returning to the past. This work uses a visual and performative language to delve into memory, absence, and the spectral presence of those who are gone, making it profoundly relevant to the post-Holocaust context in Poland. Wilhelm Sasnal, a contemporary Polish artist, presents an alternative vision and history of Tarnow. His paintings tackle politically topical themes, including the reappraisal of the treatment of Poland's Jewish population during the German occupation in the Second World War, which was characterized by a threatening anti-Semitic mood. Sasnal's work directly engages with the uncomfortable truths of Polish society's complicity and the persistent antisemitism, opening up discussions that are often suppressed or avoided in public discourse. Dorota Krakowska's co-curated past exhibition “BYLISMY (Once we were)” where, among other, the works by Kantor and Sasnal were shown, combined contemporary art and history to create non-obvious spaces that generate confrontation and tension. The use of a second exhibition space in Tarnow's old Jewish quarter further underscored this direct engagement with historical sites and their erased narratives. This approach demonstrates how art can activate historical locations and make the absence of Jewish life tangible [6].
In contrast, the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow functions as a more traditional institution, dedicated to “commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and celebrate the Jewish culture of Polish Galicia, presenting Jewish history from a new perspective” [7]. Its mission also includes challenging stereotypes and misconceptions about Poland's Jewish past and educating both Poles and Jews and others about their histories. The permanent exhibition TRACES OF MEMORY featuring photographs by the museum's founder Chris Schwarz, depicts abandoned Jewish sites, such as synagogues and overgrown cemeteries and forgotten sites of killings and mass graves, places of the horrific acts of the National Socialists. These photographs aim to present Jewish history from a new perspective and “challenge the stereotypes and misconceptions”. While the museum does crucial work in dealing with Jewish heritage, its primary goal is education and remembrance. During our visit, maybe contradictory, there was a perceived tendency for the museum to leave the past rather in the past, in contrast to the more confrontational approach of contemporary art spaces. In my opinion this could hint at a potential limitation of purely historical approaches, where difficult aspects, such as Polish complicity, might somewhat acknowledged but not deeply unpacked, as mentioned before.
Beyond institutional settings, art, particularly visual art, is a powerful tool to remember and interpret past events, individuals, and processes. It conveys a variety of meanings, emotions and perspectives that help to keep memory alive. Crucially, art can articulate an alternative access, or a view of facts that can take on an alternative or an addition to a scientific perspective. This is particularly valuable for complex and difficult issues that one might not be able to say or write with simple words. Art can expose intangible emotions, or unspeakable things through visual and narrative (re-)presentation and offer viewers the opportunity to share these experiences.
A significant aspect of art's role could be its function as a visual memory for the missing visual history. In contexts where historical records are incomplete or deliberately suppressed, art can fill these gaps. It provides a means to de-construct political complexities and present them in novel ways, offering endless possibilities for understanding, or are a starting point for scientific research projects such as Non-memory.
Further, art can be used to negotiate traumatic experiences. For instance, Hana Umeda's “Rapeflower” [8] performatively addresses sexual violence and processing practices, demonstrating how art can provide a non-verbal voice to articulate deeply painful and often silenced experiences. This reflects art's capacity to facilitate healing and understanding in the face of widespread brutalization, such as that experienced during occupations in the second World War.
Memory Voids and Non-Memory
A central theme during the excursion was the concept of void in the memory – absences in collective remembrance that can be intentional or unintentional, forgotten or actively non-remembered. Art plays a critical role in addressing this void. Adam Bartosz [9] describes the task as making “knowledge about the Jews and about what happened to them fuller and less remote,” specifically by “filling an unfelt void with content”. This requires first evoking this sense of lack, developing an awareness among the local population of the “demographic, cultural, and historical void” created decades ago. The goal is to “fill oblivion with memory”. Haviva Pedaya [2] reinforces this, stating that the “healing work of creation, of art, must take place” within this “empty space,” whether it is traumatically empty or “filled to the brim with compressed shards, remnants of destruction”.
The concept of Non-Memory as explored by Roma Sendyka, [10] is particularly insightful in this context. Non-memorydoes not equate to forgetting; rather, it describes a situation where memories of places, such as mass graves, might no longer be visibly present or actively discussed, yet the memory is still carried by people. These places have no visible characteristics that point to the atrocities committed there.
Artists, particularly photographers, have engaged directly with this phenomenon to highlight and fill these blind spots in memory (and ultimately marked the entrance point for certain scientific research. Examples include Ansgar Gilster's TOTE WINKEL (Blind Spots) [11] who points to these hidden areas of remembrance, where photographs “fill the void in the memory”. [9] Gilster's work illustrates that not only Auschwitz was the Holocaust, emphasizing the widespread nature of atrocities beyond the most well-known extermination camps. There is a similar aesthetic between Gilster's photographs and those displayed in the Galicia Museum, suggesting a shared visual language in confronting forgotten sites. Andrej Kramarz's A PIECE OF LAND [12] also contributes to understanding killing sites, as Roma Sendyka mentioned, through photography, demonstrating how art can initiate a process of comprehension for places where unspeakable acts occurred but where physical traces are minimal or deliberately erased.
These artistic interventions make it clear that while places might be physically devoid of markers, the memory persists and can be evoked through artistic representation. This allows for a deeper and more distributed understanding of the Holocaust beyond its most recognized symbols, urging a broader recognition of the numerous unmemorialized sites of destruction across Poland.
Challenges and Nuances in Remembering
The process of negotiating Jewish heritage in Poland through art is not without its challenges and complexities. There is an unease when talking about Jewish past in Poland, which often leads to a constructive engagement being prevented, hidden, because the history is not told. This unease stems from various factors, including the controversy surrounding Polish complicity and the differing opinions on the presence of antisemitism in contemporary Poland.
The question of whether non-Jewish Poles were perpetrators, victims or spectators is debated to this day. While there's a consensus that the post-war communist government actively neglected the fact that the vast majority of those murdered were Jewish, views on Polish complicity and antisemitism remain widely divergent. Some argue that antisemitism is no more visible in Poland than elsewhere, while others assert its definite presence, though often hidden (as in not confrontational but through graffiti or social media), potentially hindering open discussion. Contemporary art, through works like Sasnal's, directly engages with these sensitive political topics, offering alternative visions and histories that challenge prevailing narratives and confront uncomfortable truths.
What are the practical and ethical differences between museums and art spaces? Museums, with their core tasks of collecting, preserving, researching and disseminating, [13] often have specific thematic constraints and a societal service mission. Art spaces arguably have less constraints on what can be exhibited and fewer or rather different core tasks in that sense in relation to society. This freedom allows contemporary art to spark ethical controversies and explore subjects in ways that traditional institutions might not, opening up new avenues for processing the past, even if it means discomfort or challenging established norms.
In conclusion, contemporary art, particularly visual art, arguably plays an indispensable and transformative role in shaping and negotiating Jewish remembrance and heritage in Poland. It transcends mere historical documentation, offering a dynamic, emotional, and often provocative medium to confront a traumatic past. By creating platforms for dialogue, filling memory voids, and challenging established narratives, art helps to unfreeze historical perspectives and make the absent present. Contemporary art spaces, such as the BWA Gallery of Modern Art, intentionally or unintentionally become sites where historical accounts intersect with contemporary artistic expression, sparking critical reflection and challenging viewers to engage with difficult truths about complicity, silence, and remembrance. Through the works of artists like Kantor, Sasnal, Gilster, Kramarz, and Hana Umeda, contemporary art facilitates the processing of complex issues, provides a visual memory for the missing visual history, and keeps alive the memory of a largely eradicated culture. Ultimately, in a country where the Jewish past remains fraught and often unspoken, contemporary art provides a vital, alternative language for remembrance, confrontation, and the continuous negotiation of identity and history.
Sources
[1] Krakowska Dorota (2014): Introduction. In: Bujinowska, Anna and Krakowska, Dorota (2014): Exhibition Catalog: Bylismy – Once we were, Tarnow: BWA w Tarnowie.
[2] Haviva Pedaya: Art is the Song that Bridges the Shattered Space. In Bujinowska, Anna and Krakowska, Dorota (2014): Exhibition Catalog: Bylismy – Once we were, Tarnow: BWA w Tarnowie. 59 – 63
[4] https://www.bpb.de/themen/europa/polen/557778/kulturpolitik-im-wandel/#node-content-title-1
[5] https://www.bwa.tarnow.pl/
[6] Bujinowska, Anna and Krakowska, Dorota (2014): Exhibition Catalog: Bylismy – Once we were, Tarnow: BWA w Tarnowie
[7] https://galiciajewishmuseum.org/en/
[8] https://hanaumeda.com/rapeflower/
[9] Bartosz, Adam (2014): What happened to Tarnow’s Jews? In: Bujinowska, Anna and Krakowska, Dorota (2014): Exhibition Catalog: Bylismy – Once we were, Tarnow: BWA w Tarnowie. 31- 49
[10] Sendyka, R. (2022). Non-memory: Remembering beyond the discursive and the symbolic. Memory Studies, 15(3), 523-538. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980221085528
[11] https://ansgargilster.de/de/tote-winkel/22
[12] https://www.akramarz.com/a-piece-of-land
[13] https://icom.museum/en/resources/standards-guidelines/museum-definition/