It began on May 2 in Canterbury Cathedral, with a performance of Krzysztof Penderecki’s magnificent St Luke’s Passion, conducted by the composer. It finishes on the South Bank next May with a weekend of Polish jazz, folk and classical music directed by the violinist Nigel Kennedy, who lives for much of the year in Krakow, arguably southern Poland’s most beautiful city.
In between, a remarkable programme of more than 200 exhibitions, concerts – including the world premiere of Gorecki’s Fourth Symphony and a Chopin bicentenary recital by the pianist Krystian Zimerman – film screenings and other events celebrating Polish culture has been organised in venues across Britain under the banner “Polska! Year”.
While a few of the art exhibitions are devoted to historical movements, such as the intriguing glimpse we had last spring of Polish symbolism at Tate Britain, the main focus of “Polska! Year” is on contemporary art. It features a number of postwar Poland’s most illustrious artists: Jozef Robakowski, Robert Kusmirowski, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Artur Zmijewski, Pawel Althamer, Miroslav Balka, Monika Sosnowska and Goshka Macuga. Group shows of contemporary Polish art have taken place or are yet to happen in Belfast, Norwich, Dundee, London, Edinburgh and Nottingham. One of the first exhibitions to open (at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich) was dedicated to the role of visual art – particularly a kind of abject, eastern European arte povera – in the theatre of Tadeusz Kantor, who died in 1990, shortly after the collapse of the communist regime. I shall never forget seeing Kantor’s The Dead Class at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1976 – like eavesdropping on the exchanges between inmates in an asylum.
The second world war, the Holocaust and 40 years of communist oppression cast long shadows over contemporary Polish culture, nowhere more so than in the work of Poland’s visual artists. Two powerful sculptural installations currently on view in London, Balka’s “How It Is” at Tate Modern and Kusmirowski’s “Bunker” at the Barbican, adopt very different approaches to this collective experience or memory. Balka’s enormous, disorientating black void contrasts strikingly with Kusmirowski’s claustrophobic basement filled with real objects: decaying industrial equipment, obsolete control panels, dusty offices and primitive sleeping quarters, reminiscent of a disused nuclear shelter or evoking something even more sinister.
A Jewish theme runs throughout “Polska! Year”, evidence that Polish-Jewish relations are taken very seriously by its organisers, the government-funded Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the Polish Embassy and the Polish Cultural Institute. The sensitive subject of Polish anti-Semitism was aired in the play Our Class by Tadeusz Slobodzianek, which premiered at London’s National Theatre in September. Slobodzianek’s text was inspired by the massacre of 340 Jews at Jedwabne in eastern Poland in 1941, under Nazi supervision but without Nazi participation. Until the recent political row between David Milliband and William Hague over the Conservatives’ new alliance with a grouping of hard-right parties in the European parliament, led by the Polish MEP Michal Kaminski – who is accused of opposing the Polish president’s apology for the massacre in 2001 – it is doubtful whether many people in this country would have heard of Jedwabne.
One of the most impressive publications during “Polska! Year” is Rediscovering Traces of Memory: The Jewish Heritage of Polish Galicia by social anthropologist Jonathan Webber, illustrated with photographs by the late Chris Schwarz. A British photojournalist, Schwarz founded the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow in 2004, where his haunting photographs of synagogues, cemeteries and religious schools – most in ruins – as well as death camps and memorials, are on display. The purpose of both book and exhibition is to document and encourage preservation of the remnants of the centuries-old Jewish civilisation in Galicia, southern Poland, which was destroyed by the Holocaust.
The Galicia Jewish Museum played host this summer to a range of events in the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow. Founded in 1988, the festival takes place in Kazimierz, Krakow’s former Jewish quarter. This year, in Krakow on the last day of the festival, I was invited to an electrifying rock-cum-klezmer concert in Szeroka street, where thousands danced late into the warm July night. The mission of the organiser of the festival, Janusz Makuch, Webber observes in Traces of Memory , is “to bring Jewish artists to perform in a country which is the world’s largest Jewish graveyard, as a way of both honouring the dead and demonstrating Jewish survival”.
Taken together, festivals such as “Polska! Year” in the UK and the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow play a valuable role in raising awareness of the diverse influences that shape a nation’s cultural heritage.
Richard Calvocoressi is director of the Henry Moore Foundation, which has supported exhibitions of contemporary Polish art in ‘Polska! Year’; www.polskayear.pl
