A life-sized Barbie doll stands upright on a pink wooden pedestal, its plastic arms pressed tightly against its body. The head is bald, the naked skin rippled with age. Built into its lower abdomen is a monitor showing a woman making a plaster cast of another Barbie doll. The image crackles and flickers on the ancient technology, as gallery director Agnieszka Rayzacher laughs while adjusting the controls. "Long hair, wasp waists, tight skin - these are beauty standards that are still relevant today," summarizes the 56-year-old. "They have nothing to do with reality."
For twenty years, Rayzacher has run the lokal_30 gallery for feminist art in Warsaw. She has known artist Monika Mamzeta for nearly as long - Mamzeta created the Barbie sculpture titled "Lebensborn" back in 1999. During this fall's Gallery Weekend, a coordinated opening weekend for Warsaw galleries, "Lebensborn" was awarded the main prize by the Polish Art Foundation ING. The artwork strikes a sensitive nerve in contemporary Poland, where strict and polarizing abortion laws and years of conservative family policies promoted by the PiS government have attacked women's self-determination - something Mamzeta's tortured Barbie with its surveillance monitor alludes to.
White ceramic tiles in the bathroom of the lokal_30 gallery, located on the fifth floor of an old residential building in a neighborhood behind Warsaw's glittering main train station, are painted with red and blue lacquer depicting scenes from menstrual daily life. Dozens of vulva portraits by Anna Panek hang on the living room walls, some photographed, others designed in psychedelic retro wallpaper patterns. The view from the window between these artworks seems all the more suggestive: flat roofs with chimneys, and behind them glass skyscrapers reaching high into the sky. Warsaw's skyline resembles Frankfurt or London - international capital, as economic reports confirm, has long since arrived in Warsaw. "Signs of power," jokes the gallerist as she dives into Warsaw's afternoon traffic on her bicycle.
"People have a great need to exchange ideas and show themselves!" beams Tytus Klepacz in his Lotna gallery, located on the main street Marszałkowska. Limp Bizkit echoes from the bar downstairs into the upper floor of his gallery as Klepacz points to oil paintings: a naked woman lies on a bed, her face buried in the covers. Dogs embroidered on pillows leer menacingly in her direction. With this back view, whose wavy contours suggest the depicted woman is sobbing and trembling, painter Helena Minginowicz references Titian's Venus of Urbino - also to draw attention to the violence that women encounter daily: at work, on the street, in bed.
Indeed, the Polish capital seems to have recovered from eight long years of far-right cultural warfare under the PiS government. Last year, the first Queer Museum opened. General interest in art is growing. "Fall alone was a festival," summarizes Klepacz, listing the Avant Art Festival, Warsaw Hotel Art Fair, and Gallery Weekend. There are over fifty galleries and art spaces in the city center. He recommends a walk to the Museum of Modern Art, just one kilometer away, which opened a year ago.
The long white concrete block designed by US architect Thomas Phifer is indeed impressive. Strong and self-confident, it sits on the other side of Warsaw's main traffic artery Marszałkowska - at the foot of the 237-meter-tall Palace of Culture, Stalin's gift that has dominated Warsaw's skyline since the 1950s. Inside the white building are works by Polish artists, including the 1954 sculpture "Friendship" by Alina Szapocznikow: two workers companionably putting their arms over each other's shoulders. The outer limbs are missing their forearms. The deconstructed double statue, which once belonged to the interior of the Stalinist prestige tower, is today a bitter metaphor for the former brother countries of the Soviet Union.
"I belong to Generation Europe," says chief curator Natalia Sielewicz, looking relaxed through the huge window front of the museum's new building. After graduation, she left Poland to study in London - and was swept back to her homeland by Brexit. Through reforms by the liberal Tusk government, which has been in office for two years, the art historian, like dozens of other women, came into leading positions at Poland's cultural institutions. Until January, the Museum of Modern Art is hosting the 6th Kyiv Biennial. "Near East, Far West," this year's title of the mixed exile art show, recalls the war in the neighboring country: ruin fragments from the Ukrainian front line that Nikita Kadan has delicately placed on slender stands under the title "Rest in the Classroom," or the installation "Leak. The End of the Pipeline" by Hito Steyerl, Oleksiy Radynski, and Philipp Goll about the long-lasting German-Russian gas deals that defied all criticism.
Works from the museum collection of Kyiv's Mysteckij Arsenal are also on display, especially those by Kazimir Malevich, founder of Suprematism, a native Ukrainian with Polish roots who is still considered in art history as the main representative of the Russian avant-garde. "Our museum is the switching point between Eastern Europe and the West," says Sielewicz. "We must not let ourselves be divided." Nevertheless, in the gigantic white rooms, all the artworks threaten to disappear.
To give art from the war-torn country a permanent place, Petro Vladimirov opened the TBA gallery a year ago. The tall, lanky man gently pulls aside the iron grating. A watchmaker's shop used to be in the tiny store on Wilcza Street. Today, blurred oil portraits by young Polish painter Konrad Krzyżanowski hang on the walls alongside collages by 35-year-old artist Andriy Rachinskiy from Kharkiv, who was nominated this year for the Pinchuk Art Prize, probably the most important award for young contemporary art in Ukraine.
Rachinskiy overlays photos of apartment blocks and abandoned playgrounds with the historic comic figures Hare and Wolf, the Soviet version of Tom & Jerry. The background is formed by a building ceiling. He shows the hare with blindfolded eyes and mounts Ukrainian children's counting rhymes into the picture. They are dark: "Sunset slipped behind the town, on the pond the waves rose brown / Water murmured, strange and deep / Night came down and shadows creep." A tragedy lies in this gloomy world that was originally full of colors - the wolf, as we know from the comics, will not stop chasing the hare. But he will never catch him. "Nu Pogodi!" he screams at the end of each episode: "Just wait!"
Gallerist Vladimirov, who has been living in Warsaw since Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, is moved: "The contemporary art scenes in Poland and Ukraine have always been closely connected. They form a magnificent ensemble." This also refers to the shared experience of imperialist past: Nazi Germany, Soviet Union. As Petro Vladimirov continues to the parallel street to the Roster gallery, one last question: How do the mood of awakening and artistic freedom on one side reconcile with Poland's militarization and right-wing forces on the other? He raises his eyebrows. "It is as it always is. We live on a volcano."
