All exhibits – even critical ones like those typical for an avant-garde institution like Zachęta – are of course arguments, and as such they betray the preoccupations of their social contexts and historical moments. Despite being a progressive institution, the show partakes in something of the general post-1989 backlash against all things tainted by association with the socialist era. Indeed, as the curator herself points out, the discredited socialist state, the “Polska Republika Ludowa,” had the notion of the “Folk” (“Lud”) at the core of its identity. Thus this colourful array of “folk” products and performances is today a sign of all that was wrong with the previous regime: it reduced culture to propaganda.It undertook a superficial celebration of the peasantry by urban elites while simultaneously destroying their way of life. And it replicated longstanding relations of patronizing inequality, while making the social conflict inherent in these relations invisible. [...]
If a key critique of PRL-era cultural production was its exoticization and instrumental treatment of the peasant-workers it intended to celebrate, these central subjects of interest hardly make an appearance in the gallery. To make sense of their work, we are shown the structures imposed by the state and at times their clear influence (e.g. carpets hand-embroidered with tractors), but with no insight into the human agency that in part determined the outcomes. We get ideology, that is, but not experience. How did the provincial peasants who were being called on to produce “their” culture on an industrial scale react, engage, navigate, and negotiate with their new mandate? [...]
But why is a muteness produced by the postwar socialist state’s narrow, sanitized framing of folklore reproduced by critical 21st century curators? Zachęta visitors are given no tools to understand (or even notice) either PRL folklore’s monoethnicity, nor the presence of both Jews and racialist violence that the exhibit subtly includes. It is as if both during the PRL and today, privileging the top-down voice of ideology allows cultural elites to avoid dealing with difficult topics that inevitably bubble up from below. Such silences around Jewishness can be found in many exhibitions treating Polish cultural history, where Jewish material may be present (by dint of its sheer inextricability). But it is un-, under-, or misinterpreted, leaving its unsettling resonances potentially readable (by an informed viewer) but seemingly publicly unspeakable.
