The #citizens gallery showcases a welcome diversity of ethnic and social groups – Highlanders, Jews, Roma, and Armenians, burghers and workers. The self-congratulatory wall text frames the museum’s collection as showcasing Poland’s “democratic and egalitarian” image. But in the same breath it suggests that Polish heritage was “attractive” to certain groups of citizens described as “people who contributed to our history.” They are depicted mostly in sepia-toned portraits of classic 19th century ethnographic “exotic types”: the Jewish rabbi, the Roma musician, the costumed mountain folk. These generic, un-named representatives of “other” cultural groups were posed and documented for the scientific scrutiny and aesthetic pleasure of those controlling the camera. The label states that they represent Poland’s “flavour.”
One can only conclude that the “real” Poles – those who collect, donate, and curate, as well as creating heritage and defining history – must be the Polish szlachta, or nobility. They are the essential Poles. They provisionally include other social groups (peasants, women, Jews, Roma) to the extent that they contribute to the national project as defined and controlled by the genuine articles. Museum visitors are positioned in the shoes of these true and noble Poles. They are invited to imagine themselves as those who took the photographs, not those depicted in them. [...]
Had the exhibit contained a single object from the collection that offered a view from a differently positioned Polish citizen, it might have helped seed an authentic discussion about Poland’s historical ethnic, political, gender, and class diversity. Perhaps, for example, a work by surrealist Krakow Group painter, Polish Jewish Communist and Holocaust survivor Erna Rosenstein, whose parents were murdered by a Polish bandit during the Nazi occupation, a subject to which many of her works refer. Two artifacts in the show that might testify to a broader range of cultural aspiration of Poland’s Jews – a poster advertising the First Academic Ball of the Esperanto Association, and a notebook filled with Edmund Erdman’s ideografics, a utopian international alphabet – are presented in the gallery without mention of their protagonists’ Jewish origin. The poster is displayed as an example of graphic design by Polish artist Edmund Ludwik Bartłomiejszczyk.
