Activist in an Institution

Zofia nierodzińska The text will be published in a joint publication “Acting Together” published by Municipal Gallery Arsenal edited by Jacek Zwierzyński and Zofia nierodzińska in 2022. ABSTRACT: In this essay I look back on five years of working at a municipal gallery as a curator and deputy director with an activist queer-feminist background. I compare the ideas I started working with during the conservative revolt in Poland with their materialisation in a specific space, made up of actual people, given opportunities and needs. I analyse organised exhibitions, write about participation, queering of institution, environmental and social justice, and last but not least, about the well-being of cultural workers. Activist in an Institution: Participation, Enjoyment, Burnout, and Regeneration By the time this publication is printed, it will be five years since I started working at the institution. It is therefore a kind of summary. I have known the Municipal Gallery Arsenal since my university days. I remember the sleepy atmosphere of the institution managed by its long-time director, Wojciech Makowiecki, the ferns on the cracked window sills, the antique marble floor called "brawn", the group exhibitions about the spirits of Poznań art. Alongside the academy and a few private galleries, the Arsenal was always some kind of reference point. I remember taking part in exhibitions as an artist and the stress that came with it. I remember the competition and the tense social relations driven by the logic of the market. When I was no longer in Poznań, in 2013, there was a sudden awakening, a resistance began to emerge against the capitalist arrangement of the art field, specifically against plans to privatise the gallery. A protest supported by the trade union Workers' Initiative united the gallery's workers, a 20-hour occupation of the building was organised and a series of meetings and discussions culminated in a victory against the spectre of NGO-isation. Afterwards came a painful backlash and a return to the familiar and well-worn divisions; resistance to the director Piotr Bernatowicz, an art historian with extreme right-wing views, was put up only by part of the gallery staff. Before the municipal institution sank into a religious and patriotic quagmire for the next four years, an interdisciplinary curatorial and educational project called "Towards a 1 Critical Institution" was launched and conducted by: Anna Czaban, Sylwia Czubała and Magda Popławska, already after the honourable withdrawal of its initiator Karolina Sikorska. This is how Ewa Toniak wrote about this complex undertaking: "The change came a year ago. And on this point all parties agree. The conflict radicalised thinking about the Gallery as a socially engaged place. From the point of view of the authorities, this is a bad thing. Four young women, freed from 'salon' authority (...) reproduce all the gender stereotypes: unpredictability, aversion to hierarchy, revolution."1 Having started working at the Arsenal after the dismissal of the conservative director and the nomination of a more liberal candidate, I tried to draw on this revolutionary rift in the gallery's history, the interregnum, when the largely feminist team felt empowered and tried to rethink the institution. As part of "Towards a Critical Institution", the curators organised several meetings on the labour situation, the role of the institution, its social and economic conditions. Abstracts of the debates were published in a book with the same title2. Mikołaj Iwański in his text "Towards a Public Institution" writes about the municipal gallery as a place of resistance against the commercialisation of every area of social life. The municipal gallery thus manifests its belonging to the public sector alongside, for instance, a hospital or a nursery, unfortunately sharing with them also the conditions of precarious employment and the problem of outsourcing. Equipped with symbolic capital, however, curators and artists are reluctant to see themselves in a class perspective together with nursery workers and, for example, paramedics working on freelance contracts. Aware of these systemic conditions, I wished to combine the social and political positioning of the institution with a progressive programme of content. This was possible on condition that I rejected the formula of an 'exhibition salon' for an exclusive group of connoisseurs. I imagined the gallery as a platform, which takes a side in a social discourses, something like the Museum of Current Art postulated by Jerzy Ludwiński, Nora Sternfeld's Democratic Museum or Piotr Piotrowski's Critical Museum, enriched with queer-feminist, postcolonial, socially and ecologically engaged practice. 1 2 Ewa Toniak: http://wstroneinstytucjikrytycznej.blogspot.com/2014/07/ewa-toniak-juz-po_3.html, access 3.04.2022 Karolina Sikorska ed., Towards a Critical Institution, Galeria Miejska Arsenał, Poznan 2014 2 SICK STATES The first exhibition I organised in the gallery was 'The Romantic Breast Cancer Adventures of Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle'. It was a display of stereotypes in a 20th century fotoplastikon. The fotoplastikon was the pride of the former director; the photographs from the celebrations of the millennium of the Baptism of Poland were one of those presented there. The exhibition of an ecosexual lesbian duo from California was critically referring to this patriotic, God-fearing aesthetic. For several weeks, the interior of the century-old machine was home to intimate photographs depicting the disease process that the protagonist Annie, a performer and retired pin up-girl, experienced together with her partner Beth and the spiritus movens of the story: breast cancer. The illness, devoid of pathos, was here what strengthened the bond between the partners and all the human and non-human actors. It was an experience that constituted a community, breaking the alienation typical of the process of being sick in the late-capitalist society. I returned to this positive impact of the disease later, along with the research team (Luiza Kempińska, Paweł Leszkowicz, Jacek Zwierzyński) while organising the exhibition and events "Creative Sick States: AIDS, CANCER, HIV", which took place two years after the presentation in the fotoplastikon and a few months before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Here we took as our starting point the experience of Amazons (women with breast cancer), groups working with people living with HIV, and artists confronting the disease in their biographies. Our aim was to socialise the disease, to detabuse it, especially when it comes to HIV, against the neoliberal paradigm of health and self-sufficiency. It has also become a tradition at the gallery to hold annual screenings of films in collaboration with Visual AIDS from New York as part of World AIDS Day, accompanied by discussions about the situation in Poland. PARTICIPATION I started working in a place marked by conflict, where half the staff supported the official government policy and did not want to make any moves that could be interpreted as critical. However, all the exhibition projects I initiated and participated in were political, addressing emancipatory issues in feminist, queer, materialist or ecological optics. This caused tensions and often led to open conflicts. I did not intend to change the programme, because this was the only way I could imagine my presence in the gallery, while the right-wing part of the 3 team did not spare me the harassment and technical-administrative difficulties in the realisation of exhibitions and events. In fact, the situation in the gallery did not differ much from the divisions existing in Polish society, rather it was a classic example of them. In addition to this open hostility, I was also subjected to a smear campaign by the right-wing media, in particular Radio Poznań, the director of which, for some time, was Piotr Bernatowicz, who employed most of the people who had left the gallery with him. Thinking about it from a distance, it seems to me that it was only thanks to a certain degree of craziness and a fair amount of self-exploitation that the planned events were able to take place. I wished the gallery to be an egalitarian place, indifferent to what goes on beyond its walls, so that it becomes involved in the ongoing social processes. Most of the exhibitions I was involved in overcame the classical museum division of roles separating the audience from the artist and his/her work. The participation of people from outside the conventionally understood art field as well as the departure from the aesthetics associated with minimalism and from the escapist, neoliberal attitude propagated in the Polish academy were the starting points. Probably because my presence in the institution is not clear-cut, also my professional role as a curator was subject to constant redefinitions, hence the work in research groups and the collectivisation of the choice-making process. Over time, the team was enlarged by such people as Jacek Zwierzyński, who from then on was in charge of publishing projects, including co-editing the RTV Magazine, and Kinga Mistrzak, responsible for the social programme and education. Their presence greatly strengthened the small content team and allowed the general programme character to be shifted towards left-wing and engaged projects. WORKSHOPS OF REVOLUTION "Workshops of revolution" was a month-long situation in process realised in cooperation with the cult Poznan Teatr Ósmego Dnia [Theater of the Eight Day]. We organised it on the 50th anniversary of May '68, which in Poland infamously began in March. In the gallery, an infrastructure for action was built from materials that had remained from previous exhibitions. Workshops were held by Gyne Punk, a collective that deconstructs medical knowledge based on colonial exclusions and transforms it into DIY tactics, or by Ultra-red, a group that uses sound as a tool for political agitation. The theatre hosted an exhibition 4 featuring films by the representative of the New German cinema Alexander Kluge and an installation by Jasmina Metwaly referencing the Arab Spring. It was the first, after a low-key exhibition in a fotoplastikon, such a complex project for which I was responsible. I invited Polish and foreign collectives working at the intersection of art and activism. During the realisation of this project, I experienced all the difficulties associated with the materialisation of ideas in reality. Despite the very distinctive graphic design created in collaboration with the Bękarty studio, which was visible on the streets of Poznan, very few people came to events with non-Polish-speaking groups. The Poznań audience likes what it already knows. On my part, there was certainly a lack of outreach work, i.e. getting out of institutions to encourage people to participate in workshops and discussions. Of the month-long processes, the most memorable was a meeting with Joan Murphy organised as part of a workshop with the Feminist Health Care Research Group. The representative of second-wave feminism spoke about the emancipation of the female body and self-examination as a strategy of resistance. At the same time, the Polish media once again heated up the discussion on the total ban on abortion. The closing event of the month-long non-festival was a meeting with the Bojka Diving Collective, which brings together women with disabilities and allied people. It concerned stereotypes and social exclusion, and took place during the courageous struggle of people with disabilities and their families, during which protesters occupied the parliament building for 40 days. QUEERING INSTITUTION Breaking the tradition of the 'exhibition hall' or, in other words, queering the institution, perhaps resonated most fully during a series of sleepovers entitled BEDTIME organised by two girls' collectives: COVEN Berlin and Dziewczyństwo [Girlhood] from Poznań. In the lower exhibition hall stood two large canopy beds designed by Ula Lucińska. The windows of the modernist building were covered with transparent foil in shades of pink, gold and blue. Throughout those few weeks in September Arsenal became a really cosy place. The girls suggested changing the gallery's opening hours. Under the cover of darkness the respectable institution was taken over by queer perfomances, karaoke, girls' talks, 5 confidences, flirtations, pillow fights and more. Remnants of the night's performances remained until the morning, making the exhibition's scenography constantly change. Apart from the symbolic takeover of the institution by the sleep-in format, the encounter between queer-feminist activists from Berlin and Poznań was essential here. Like the sleep-in organised by the Swedish composer Carl Michael von Hausswolff during the infamous INTERPOL exhibition, there was no shortage of conflict situations here either. In 1996, tensions between artists from the former communist countries and those from the "West" escalated to such an extent that during the vernissage one of the works was destroyed and the Swedish audience was bitten by the Russian performer Oleg Kulig, as a result of which the artist was arrested. In our case, no one was arrested, but the cultural differences were noticeable, for example on the level of language, due to the differences in socialisation and in the interpretation of cultural codes. From the very beginning, the exhibition caused a panic in the right-wing media, who announced just before its opening that immoral behaviour would take place during the nights. They also seriously threatened their viewers with fantasies about playing with faeces. We included the materials of the local WTK television and the reports of Radio Poznań in the trailer announcing the exhibition, as well as in the work of Esther Nelke, in which the artist added an alternative narrative in English to the "talking heads" of the defenders of morality. Despite the tragicomic attacks of the right-wing media, the minor and major disagreements between the participants and the problems with the weekend's audience, I think BEDTIME brought a well-measured dose of girlish ferment to a cultural institution tired of its past, which I hope changed all of us slightly. SOCIAL AND ECOLOGICAL JUSTICE A municipal gallery building, especially one built more than half a century ago, is quite a specific biotope. It combines the future of an institution with the history of the avant-garde locked in a damp cellar. This is where the Spider of Many Threads has made her home, becoming the patron of the exhibition "Magical Engagement", which intertwines human and non-human stories and activities rooted in art, activism and education. Anna Siekiera, Paweł Błęcki, Kinga Mistrzak and myself were the guides on the exhibition's tangled paths. Due to the spread of the virus, we had to move some of the events online; with the help of a video created in collaboration with environmentalists, we urged people not to mow meadows, and 6 in Rogalin, together with the artist Jadwiga Anioła, we learned how to weave folk ornaments known as spiders. In the "altars" dedicated to forest, water, air, earth and grassroots movements, we archived ecological struggles based in Poland from the 1980s (Klub Gaja, I prefer to be) to the present (Poznanians Against Hunters, Green Wave, XR, Fridays for Future...). As part of the educational trail, we established cooperation with children from the Roma settlement, who also took part in the opening. At the opening, in front of the gallery building, the phenomenal choir Odłam Źdźbło [Break the Blade of Grass Choir] performed. The exhibition was criticised for its lack of a political dimension. I tend to think it was about expanding what is political, rejecting exclusionary minimalism in favour of peripheral diversity, instead of metropolitan aesthetics, indulging in communal rituals. "Magical Engagement" was an exhibition considering non-human narratives, premonitions and affects that are political because they are triggered by systemic violence based on interspecies, capitalist exploitation. PANDEMIC AND WORKERS' RIGHTS The pandemic became as disruptive as it was an interesting moment for the functioning of the gallery. During the first lockdown associated with the suspension of exhibition activities, we switched our events to online mode. We didn't only present "works from the collection", but also started to lobby for the unemployed cultural workers, artists and educators who were left without structural support. We organised online debates on the state of culture and the state of art education. The former resulted in the creation of a fund by the City Hall for the purchase of works by artists from the Poznań scene, which did not have to be prepared specifically for this purpose, they could be traces of processes, ready-made objects or ideas. From an independent cultural place DOMIE in Poznań initiated by Katarzyna Wojtczak and Martyna Miller we bought a hole in the roof for the Arsenal's collection, which was patched up after the funds were paid. When the gallery building remained closed due to the pandemic, we decided to organise a two-month residency and exhibition of the ephemeral collective Galeria Sandra, which brings together female artists and curators from Poznań. The girls took over the gallery and gained a place to work, while we gained the sense of maintaining an institution that was closing down and opening up again. 7 WELL-BEING AND ACCESSIBILITY An important but underestimated role of public institutions is to take care of the well-being of their employees. During the strike of artists, whose face was Zbigniew Libera presenting the slogan: "I am an artist, but that doesn't mean I work for free", we learned about the difficult situation of artists in post-transformation Poland. In "The Black Book of Polish Artists," the authors argued on the basis of surveys that in order to become an artist, one had to have at least a flat of one's own, but preferably constant financial support from one’s relatives. This revealed the class privileges needed to make a living in the professionalised art field. Among the voices calling for the rights of artists over the years, those of cultural workers are rarely heard. This is reiterated in the most recent manifesto of the visual artists from 2021, initiated by the academics and students of the Academy of Art in Szczecin. Meanwhile, the economic situation of cultural workers has been deteriorating for years. Artists can, at least to a small extent, compensate for their difficult economic situation by gaining symbolic and social capital, which remains inaccessible to cultural workers who perform their duties in the background of the art world. In order for this situation to change, a fundamental re-evaluation is required: an appreciation of relational, affective and caring work in place of the exorbitant investments in infrastructure and collection purchases made in commercial art galleries. Much more attention should also be paid to the accessibility of exhibitions and events for marginalised groups. I see these activities as emancipatory, aimed not only at increasing the visibility of people from vulnerable groups (the economically underprivileged, non-heteronormative people, people with disabilities...) in the symbolic sphere, but also at making lasting changes in the way institutions function. This is possible through cooperation with local communities, building coalitions with NGOs and using the capacity of institutions (media coverage, contacts) in situations of mobilisation, e.g. when there is a need to draw attention to urgent social matters. This is when the municipal gallery becomes a place where relations are established and social dissensus is practised, where its employees are not indifferent to what happens in and outside the institution, but feel co-responsible for the context they co-create and from which they sometimes actively withdraw in protest. 8 9