By Katherine Bujalska, Artes Mundi Live Guide
During the last few weeks, the exhibition has had quite a few young Polish visitors and where possible, I have grabbed them for a quick reflection on two of Yael Bartana’s films ‘Mary Koszmary’ and ‘Wall and Tower’. Last week I led a group of ESOL students around the show, four of whom were Polish, so had the chance to grill them in more depth.
The overriding response appeared to be that the films did not consider Poland’s current state - that it is not as it was in the 1930s when so many Jews were relocated to the Middle East. I don’t know what Poland is like today but the only real indication we could find in ‘Mary Koszmary’ were glimpses of the activities of market traders around the rim of the ‘Stadion Dziesiecioleca’. These people are mostly immigrants to the country.
Yael Bartana is not attempting to offer up a real solution to the issue of a Jewish homeland with this film. She unravels any supposition of this in part 2 of the trilogy, ‘Wall and Tower’ where the small contingent of Jews shown settling in Warsaw do so in a structure seemingly designed to prevent integration.
My own father grew up in Poland and the lasting sentiment he held of his early childhood (during the early 1940s) was that Jewish culture was synonymous with Polish culture. Mine is a second-hand account of one household within a country, but surely his was not an isolated experience? Unfortunately it is now one which cannot be directly compared to those with a contemporary experience of the newer, post-communist Poland they grew up in, but perhaps it should be. This point has been highlighted for me by these films and by the reactions of young Poles to them.
The visual references Yael Bartana employs – the recognisable Zionist film aesthetics, the red neck-tied youths, the archetypal wall and tower architecture – come from relatively recent histories. But where are the concrete visual or cultural references to the Jewish presence in Poland (or anywhere) pre-1930s? And would we recognize them anyway? I think the lack of any deeper Jewish historical reference in these films is purposeful. It reflects its absence elsewhere. I hope that people who see these films feel this neglected part of history is worth exploring.
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