POLISH CULTURAL INSTITUTE NEW YORK winter/SPRING 2015 pc i - NY WINTER/SPRING 2015

music 2 the PASSENGER 6 uNSOUND 22 aGATA ZUBEL

THEATER 8 ceNTENNIAL OF TADUESZ KANTOR 30 ida KAMIŃSKA 32 OUR CLASS 33 (A)POLLONIA

VISUAL ARTS 12 stORYLINES: CONTEMPORARY ART AT THE GUGGENHEIM 19 retrieviNG LOOTED POLISH WORKS OF ART 36 erNA ROSENSTEIN 37 aNDRZEJ WRÓBLEWSKI

DANCE 14 pOLISH NATIONAL BALLET

HUMANITIES/LITERATURE 16 warsaw RISING MUSEUM 34 BOOKEXPO AMERICA

FILM 18 the return 23 ida 24 OBSCURE PLEASURES: THE FILMS OF WALERIAN BOROWCZYK

residencies/RESEARCH TRIPS 38 visual ARTS: DESIGN 39 music/huma nitieS

about us 40 pOlish cultural institute NEW YORK LOGO FINAL

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Dear Friends,

2015 marks the 15th anniversary of the Polish Cultural Institute New York. Thanks to the expertise and dedication of our past and present staff, collaborations with our Polish and American partners and presenters, and the vision and support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland, we have been able to bring the very best of Polish art and culture here to the United States.

In 2015 the Polish Cultural Institute New York will be celebrating 250 years of public theater in Poland as well as the centennial of Tadeusz Kantor, the visionary theater director and artist. But we start the year with great expectations for Paweł Pawlikowski’s internationally-acclaimed film Ida, which is in the running for the Golden Globes and, we hope, for the Oscars. Also in film, we are planning two major retrospectives of renowned Polish directors: Walerian Borowczyk at the Film Society Lincoln Center in the spring and Wojciech Jerzy Has at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the fall. We will also continue to support smaller projects like the spring presentation of selected films by Piotr Szulkin, whose work we hope to explore in greater depth next year.

The Polish Cultural Institute New York also supports bringing Poland’s creative and cultural industries into the United States through our residency program. Having previously supported architecture and landscape architecture, this year we will be bringing the innovative Polish designer Paweł Grobelny to New York City. We’ll also be supporting Polish representation at cultural trade fairs in the US, promoting Polish visual artist Natalia LL at Frieze New York and Polish publishing houses at BookExpo America, both in May. We will continue to organize research trips to Poland to foster collaboration between American and Polish cultural professionals and institutions. For example, this January MoMA curators will visit the archives of the world-famous Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.

This season also sees great opportunities for cultural tourism in Poland, such as visiting the recently expanded Cricoteka Center for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor in Kraków, the Warsaw Rising Museum, and music festivals such as Warsaw Autumn, Cross-Culture, Unsound, and Sacrum Profanum. Visitors can enjoy Poland’s modernist cuisine and see the latest trends in crafts and design.

In a new initiative, this year the Polish Cultural Institute New York will reach beyond North America by supporting two New York-based Polish visual artists at the 56th Venice Biennale: Joanna Malinowska and CT Jasper in the Polish Pavilion, curated by Magdalena Moskalewicz, a current A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral C-MAP Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

This issue contains only some of the highlights of the Polish Cultural Institute New York 2015 winter/spring season. Please check out our website www.polishculture-nyc.org, subscribe to our e-blasts, and follow us on social media to get the latest news on our activities, as well as interesting information about Polish art and culture.

We wish you all the best for the coming season, and invite you to join us and our partners in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, Toronto and Venice.

Bartek Remisko Acting Director 2 p c i - N Y 201 5 | music Mieczysław Weinberg The Passenger Based on the Novel by Zofia Posmysz February – March 2015

"Music of beauty and enormity…it is a perfect masterpiece…it is a hymn to humanity…to the international solidarity of those who, subjected to the most terrible evil, stood up against fascism." —Dmitri Shostakovich about The Passenger

The Lyric Opera of Chicago presents the Chicago premiere of Polish-Jewish composer Mieczysław Weinberg’s The Passenger February 24 through March 15, 2015. This poignant and gripping 20th-century masterpiece is set to a libretto by Alexander Medvedev and is based on the book The Passenger by the Polish writer and concentration camp survivor Zofia Posmysz. Suppressed for more than 40 years, Weinberg’s gripping opera has emerged anew, electrifying audiences at Austria’s Bregenz Festival and again in Warsaw and London. The opera had its U.S. premiere on January 18, 2014 at the Houston Grand Opera, and its New York premiere on July 10, 2014 as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. The Polish Cultural Institute New York was honored to host Zofia Posmysz for a performance of The Passenger and panel discussions.

Onstage, the action of The Passenger moves between two realms—the pristine white deck of a luxury liner above, and the dark horrors of the death camp below. On the liner, a West German diplomat, Walter, and his wife, Liese, are bound for a new posting in Brazil. Unbeknownst to her husband, Liese served as an SS officer in Auschwitz. Her past comes back to haunt her when she thinks she recognizes a fellow passenger as one of the prisoners she oversaw. Liese is never able to confirm whether the woman she sees is truly Marta, the Polish prisoner she once manipulated, and The Passenger makes no attempt at closure or reconciliation. Instead, the harsh and complex realities of the mass murder Liese helped perpetrate, and of her inescapable guilt, are unsparingly confronted.

In conjunction with The Passenger, Lyric Unlimited—the arm of Lyric Opera of Chicago dedicated to community engagement, new artistic initiatives, and collaborative events— is partnering with a range of cultural institutions to present a wide-ranging series exploring the themes and messages of Weinberg’s important work. Memory and Reckoning includes discussions with scholars and creators of the Passenger production, performances of Weinberg chamber music by members of the Lyric Opera Orchestra, orchestral music by the Northwestern University symphony and chamber orchestras, a film screening of the classic 1963 Polish film version of the book, directed by Andrzej Munk, and the world premiere of a newly commissioned klezmer opera, The Property by Wlad Marhulets.

Please visit our website www.polishculture-nyc.org or Chicago Lyric Opera’s website for details.

4 p c i - N Y 201 5 | music

The Passenger is a co-production of Bregenzer Festspiele, Austria; Teatr Wielki Opera Narodowa Warszawa; the English National Opera, London; and Teatro Real, Madrid.

The Lyric Opera presentation of The Passenger is generously supported by Richard P. and Susan Kiphart, Sylvia Neil and Daniel Fischel, the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation, Sidley Austin LLP, Manfred and Fern Steinfeld, and Helen and Sam Zell, with additional support from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw as part of the Polska Music program.

A project of Lyric Unlimited, The Property and Memory and Reckoning are supported by an anonymous donor and Seymour H. Persky, with additional support from Joyce E. Chelberg and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

The partner organizations involved in Memory and Reckoning are the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership, the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Chicago Humanities Festival, the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Chicago.

Zofia Posmysz was born in Kraków on August 23, 1923. When World War II broke out, she dropped out of school and in order to avoid deportation to Germany as a forced laborer, she became a waitress at a German mess hall, while continuing her education illegally. On April 15, 1942, she and her classmates were arrested, and soon Posmysz was deported to Auschwitz before being relocated to a penal camp in the nearby village of Budy. After two months of starvation and hard labor they were sent to the new women’s camp in Birkenau.

In Birkenau, Pomysz contracted diseases which decimated the inmates, but later was assigned less strenuous activities, which gave her a better chance for survival: in the kitchen and stockroom. She met Tadeusz Paolone-Lisowski, brought from the men’s camp to train her in bookkeeping. On January 18, 1945 the camp was evacuated in the infamous “Death March.” The surviving women were transferred to the Ravensbrück camp and later to a sub-camp in Neustadt-Glewe. The sub-camp was liberated by the Allies on May 2, 1945. With a group of twenty female companions, she decided to walk back home (an episode depicted in her story “To Freedom, to Death, to Life”). She arrived in Kraków at the end of May to find that her father, a railroad worker, had been killed by a German railroad policeman in August 1943. She moved to Warsaw and started her course of study at the Polish Department of the University of Warsaw. She worked part-time as a proofreader at a newspaper and after graduation got a job working for the literary section of Polish Radio.

In 1950, she wrote a radio drama titled The Passenger in Cabin 45. It was quickly adapted into a television play, after which the famous movie director Andrzej Munk decided to make a film version, under the title The Passenger. The movie was released shortly after Munk’s untimely death in 1963. A year before, The Passenger had appeared in a book form. This novel became the basis of Mieczysław Weinberg’s 1968 opera, with a libretto by Alexander Medvedev. The world premiere was staged at the Bregenz Festival in 2010. In addition to The Passenger, Posmysz is author of several novels, including Vacation on the Adriatic, Microclimate, and The Price, as well as short stories, radio dramas and screenplays. The story “Auschwitz Christ,“ an extension of one of the episodes of The Passenger, is undoubtedly one of the most important eyewitness accounts presented by this outstanding writer and remarkable woman. The Passenger has been translated into fifteen languages, but is not yet available in English.

6 p c i - N Y 201 5 | music UNSOUND June 2015

“By bringing unprecedented performances from international artists to existing and new spaces in Brooklyn, Unsound New York 2014 once again has helped to raise the bar for music enthusiasts, as well as suggest new directions for the quickly-progressing experimental scenes now developing across the city.” —The Quietus, April 10, 2014

In 2015, Unsound will work with the Luminato Festival in Toronto (June 19-28) to create a festival- within-a-festival. Following four successful editions of Unsound Festival New York, this will mark Unsound’s first event in Canada.

Unsound Toronto also builds on Unsound’s cooperation with the Adelaide Festival in Australia, once again creating a unique intersection between a large-scale arts event and a festival that has emerged from the electronic and experimental underground.

Unsound Toronto will take place June 20 & 21 in the massive Hearn Generating Station—an abandoned power plant that is more than three times the size of London’s Tate Modern. Unsound and Luminato Festival are working together on the exciting possibilities the Hearn offers, and connecting with the festival’s Kraków event, where concerts and club nights usually take place in specially-adapted spaces.

The program itself will focus on the uncompromising, sometimes extreme music on which Unsound has built its name, with a mix of some of the leading figures in the experimental scene, as well as emerging artists. The spectrum of sounds will include club music, noise, post-classical, ambient and beyond. Poland will of course be well represented, thanks to a partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

Fans of Unsound in the United States won’t miss out in 2015. Alongside the Unsound Toronto events, Unsound will work with the Polish Cultural Institute New York to program a tour of several Polish acts in New York and other cities, shining a spotlight on the incredibly vibrant state of Poland’s underground music scene, one of the strongest and most original in Europe. Artists included will be announced soon.

Established in Kraków in 2003, Unsound is an electronic and experimental music festival that has grown from a small underground event to a worldwide force.

Please visit our website www.polishculture-nyc.org, as well as www.unsound.pl, and www.luminatofestival.com.

Unsound Toronto is presented by the Luminato Festival, with support from the Polish Cultural Institute New York. 8 p c i - N Y 201 5 | theater Centennial of Tadeusz Kantor By Michal Kobialka, University of Minnesota

Tadeusz Kantor (April 6, 1915–December 8, 1990, born in Wielopole, Poland) was a painter, theater director, stage designer, theorist of performance, and the founder of the Cricot 2 Theater.

The breadth and diversity of Kantor’s artistic endeavors align him with such artists as Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Anselm Kiefer, Peter Brook, or Robert Wilson.

Kantor started to stage plays and paint during the modernist revolution that swept France, the Soviet Union, and Poland in the 1920s and 1930s. Like the Dadaists, constructivists, and surrealists, Kantor believed that:

Everything I have done in art so far, has been the reflection of my attitude toward the events that surrounded me, toward the situation in which I have lived; of my fears […]; of my skepticism; my hope. Kantor was introduced to symbolism and the Bauhaus while studying painting and stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. In 1938, he founded the Ephemeric (Mechanic) Theater and directed Maurice Maeterlinck’s Death of Tintagiles. In 1942, with a group of young artists, Kantor organized underground, experimental theater in Kraków during the Nazi occupation, directing Juliusz Słowacki’s Balladyna (1942) and Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Return of Odysseus (1944). In the latter production, Kantor anticipated Theodor Adorno’s famous statement from his 1962 essay “Commitment,” namely that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Kantor wrote:

Abstraction, which existed in Poland until the outbreak of World War II, disappeared in the period of mass genocide. […] The work of art lost its power. Aesthetic re production lost its power. The anger of a human being trapped by other human beasts cursed ART. We had only the strength to grab the nearest thing, THE REAL OBJECT and to call it a work of art! Yet, it was a POOR object, unable to perform any functions in life, an object about to be discarded. […] A kitchen chair… 10 p c i - N Y 201 5 | theater

This object was empty. It had to justify its being to itself rather than to the surroundings which were foreign to it. [In so doing, the object] revealed its own existence. And when its function was imposed upon it, this act was seen as if it were happening for the first time since the moment of creation. In The Return of Odysseus, Penelope, sitting on a kitchen chair, performed the act of being “seated” as a human act happening for the first time. The [physical] object acquired its historical, philosophical, and artistic function!

Kantor experimented with Art Informel, Emballages, and Happenings in the 1950s and 1960s when artists were questioning the modernist revolution of the 1920s and 1930s. In his words, his art took the form of:

PROTEST, REVOLT AGAINST THE OFFICIALLY RECOGNIZED SACRED SITES, AGAINST EVERYTHING THAT HAD A STAMP OF “APPROVAL”

Kantor’s theater of death/personal confessions (1975-1990) co-existed with the diverse forms of postmodern art and critical theory developed by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. His most widely-known productions outside of Poland, The Dead Class (1975), Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), Let the Artists Die (1985), I Shall Never Return (1988), and Today is my Birthday (1990) introduced Western audiences to non-traditional theater forms, making Kantor’s thoughts about theater, mnemotechnics, history, and the function of the artists in and of the 20th century manifest on stage.

In January 1991, Today Is My Birthday premiered in Toulouse and in Paris. It was a repetition of the last rehearsal that took place in Kraków on December 8, 1990. Kantor died that night. The memory of his habitual presence on stage was only emphasized by his physical absence— the chair where he would have sat stood empty. Was this empty chair supposed to remind us about that distant act of “sitting” on a kitchen chair in The Return of Odysseus? Was Today Is My Birthday Kantor’s journey through the debris of the twentieth-century?

Such a particular treatment of history, narrative, and memory was not novel in Kantor’s theater. Since The Dead Class, Kantor was trying to save from oblivion his individual life from being crushed by “official / History, / the history of / mass Movements, / mass ideologies, / passing terms of Governments, / terror by power, / mass wars, / mass crimes.” As he wrote shortly before his death: “My life, its fate and destiny, has always been identified with my works of art. Works of art. It found its fulfillment in my works of art. It found its solutions in them. My home was and is my work of art. A painting, a performance, a theatre, a stage.”

However, these four elements could never be treated as stable reference points mapping out the landscape of his life, because they were given different shapes and meanings depending on the pressures of the historical, cultural, and ideological circumstances:

I am … on stage. I will not be a performer. Instead, poor fragments of my own life will become “ready-made objects.” Every night, RITUAL and SACRIFICE will be performed here. What does it mean to be on stage and to watch fragments of one’s life become “ready-made” objects/memories, l'objet prêt, common, insignificant, manufactured and “possessed” objects?

The answer to this question was always different. In The Dead Class, behind the impassable barrier separating the audience from the actors, the “Old People,” the dead façades woken up as if from a sleepwalker’s dream, Kantor presented memories and apparitions brought forth from the deep recesses of his mind. This world of appearances was also the focal point of all of Kantor’s other productions, which continued to explore the contingencies of memory, history, myth, and the function of the artist in the twentieth century: Wielopole, Wielopole introduced the concept of Kantor’s “room of memory” on stage; Let the Artists Die modified the room of memory, making it a place where memories were superimposed one upon the other; I Shall Never Return offered the concept of the “inn of memory,” which existed beyond the confines of time and space, where Kantor would encounter his own past artistic and narrative creations.

Kantor was also the co-founder of the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw (1966) and the founder of the Cricoteka Archives in Kraków (1981), which opened its new venue to the public in September 2014. Cricoteka now functions as a performance space, archive, gallery, and research center. The space also hosts exhibitions, symposia, theater productions, and workshops. As per Kantor’s wish for “a collection of IDEAS born in opposition to that which exists,” Cricoteka’s new building is a public space where a work of art, space, and the audience are to create a new artistic constellation.

Kantor's impulse to collect people and useless objects, and to decipher from these objects the forces that governed the twentieth century, was never haphazard. On the contrary, Kantor's chronicling of the official and unofficial history of the last century reflected his belief that theater is an answer to, rather than a representation of, reality. Theater, as he noted, “is an activity that occurs if life is pushed to its final limits, where all categories and concepts lose their meaning and right to exist; where madness, fever, hysteria, and hallucination are the last barricades of life before the approaching TROUPES OF DEATH and death’s GRAND THEATER.” And for that he will always be remembered….

For specific Tadeusz Kantor-related events in the US throughout 2015, please visit our website www.polishculture-nyc.org. 12 p c i - N Y 201 5 | visual arts Storylines: Contemporary art at the Guggenheim June – September 2015

Featuring nearly one hundred works from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s contemporary collection, this full-rotunda exhibition will examine the diverse ways in which artists today engage with storytelling through installation, painting, photography, sculpture, video, and performance.

Opening with key examples from the 1990s by Matthew Barney, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Catherine Opie, the core of the presentation will focus on work made since 2005 that expands and transforms the narrative strategies established in these foundational works. Moving beyond plot, character, and mise-en-scène, the artists featured in this exhibition engage the histories and cultural associations embedded in bodies, materials, and found objects. Through research, appropriation, and careful attention to techniques of display and process, they create images, objects, and performative situations intended to be read in space as well as in time. As a means of foregrounding this dynamic, the curators will invite a number of authors and poets to contribute short reflections on selected works in the exhibition.

Presented in addition to standard exhibition didactics, the resulting polyphony of voices will signal the subjective interpretive potential that lies within each object on display. The exhibition will include works by Polish artists Paweł Althamer and Agnieszka Kurant, as well as Kevin Beasley, Carol Bove, Trisha Donnelly, Simon Fujiwara, Rachel Harrison, Camille Henrot, Rashid Johnson, Matt Keegan, Mark Manders, Josephine Meckseper, R. H. Quaytman, Alexandre Singh, Agathe Snow, Danh Vo, Haegue Yang, and others.

The exhibition is organized by Katherine Brinson, Curator, Contemporary Art; Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator; Nat Trotman, Associate Curator; and Joan Young, Director, Curatorial Affairs, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, with support from Carmen Hermo, Assistant Curator, Collections.

14 p c i - N Y 201 5 | dance POLISH NATIONAL BALLET June 2015

The Polish National Ballet makes its New York debut in a program of three unique works at The Joyce Theater on June 16–21, 2015. “Our mission,” says director Krzysztof Pastor, “is to show that we are young, dynamic, innovative and creative.” To this end, the company will perform three works that display the sophisticated partnership and athleticism that have characterized the Polish National Ballet’s aesthetic since Pastor took over as director in 2009. Included in the program is Emanuel Gat’s Rite of Spring, whose frenetic Latin American movements set to Stravinsky’s music prompted Le Figaro to describe it as “salsa on top of a volcano.” Two works by Pastor—Adagio & Scherzo, set to Shubert, and Moving Rooms, set to Schnittke and Górecki—complete the dazzling program.

The Polish National Ballet is Poland’s leading ballet company, currently experiencing a resurgence onto the international scene after a tumultuous and oppressive 20th century. The company is the modern continuation of the Ballet of the Wielki Theater in Warsaw, which traces its history back to the 18th century, when King Stanislaus Augustus of Poland established “His Majesty’s National Dancers.” Today, the company represents top-quality versions of the classical repertoire, as well as 20th century masterpieces and new works commissioned specifically for the Polish National Ballet. The Ballet tours regularly and has recently performed in Russia, China, Norway, Spain, Finland, Lithuania and the United States. It has won worldwide recognition and is now noted regularly by the influential London-based magazine Dance Europe as well as being featured in The New York Times and other prominent publications.

The Polish National Ballet is coming to New York for seven performances at the Joyce Theater, followed by two shows at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. on June 23–24, 2015.

The Joyce Theater Foundation, a non-profit organization, has proudly served the dance community and its audiences for three decades. The founders, Cora Cahan and Eliot Feld, acquired and renovated the Elgin Theater in Chelsea, which opened as The Joyce Theater in 1982. To date, The Joyce Theater has provided an intimate and elegant home for more than 320 domestic and international companies. The Joyce has also commissioned more than 130 new dances since 1992. The Joyce Theater now features an annual season of approximately 48 weeks with over 340 performances for audiences in excess of 135,000.

The Laurel Fund for the performing arts is a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C. It promotes all the performing arts and makes these accessible to the community, and nurtures and encourages young artists.

The Kennedy Center, located on the banks of the Potomac River near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., opened to the public in September 1971. It is the nation's busiest performing arts center, hosting approximately 3,000 events each year for audiences numbering more than 2 million. Since 1971, it has been bringing the world to Washington with magnificent performances of music, dance, theater, and more.

Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Washington, D.C.

16 p c i - N Y 201 5 | humanities WARSAW RISING Museum

On August 1, 1944, with Warsaw under German occupation and the Red Army approaching, the Polish underground resistance—known as the Home Army—launched an uprising to take control of the city as the Germans retreated. The Warsaw Uprising lasted 63 days. The Soviets waited on the east bank of the Vistula River, with Stalin preferring to let the Nazis neutralize the Home Army as a political force rather than come to the Poles’ aid. In the end, the Uprising was brutally crushed by the Nazis: Hitler ordered his troops to expel the 700,000 people still remaining in Warsaw and raze the city to the ground. By January 1945 over 85% of the city had been completely destroyed. In total, around 16,000 insurgents and nearly 200,000 civilians were killed.

Because of the Home Army’s strong anti-Communist commitment, under socialism the history of the Uprising was downplayed. A museum commemorating it was commissioned in 1983 but never built. Poles never forgot the heroes of the Uprising however, and after the end of Communist rule in 1989 they were free to commemorate them. In 2002, the mayor of Warsaw, Lech Kaczyński, promised the new Museum would open in time for the 60th anniversary of the Uprising—which it did, on July 31, 2004, in Warsaw’s historic streetcar power station building.

The Warsaw Rising Museum’s main, interactive exhibition covers several floors and allows visitors to follow the Uprising chronologically, with calendars describing the events day-by-day. It includes recorded testimonials, film taken by insurgents during the Uprising, replicas of key locations and profiles of individual fighters. Visitors can see reconstructions of an underground printing studio, an insurgent hospital and a replica of the sewer tunnels Home Army fighters escaped through in the last days of the Uprising. The Museum also has in its collection a full-size replica of an American B-24 Liberator, one of the planes used to make air drops to support the Home Army, and an original makeshift armored car used by the insurgents. Outside, the Freedom Park’s memorial wall commemorates the thousands who died in those two months of 1944.

The Museum sponsors a wide range of community activities for children and adults, as well as supporting artistic projects related to the Uprising, such as albums of songs from the period in modern arrangements. In 2014, the Museum sponsored two films, both by award- winning director Jan Komasa. Warsaw Uprising (Powstanie Warszawskie), fully produced by the Museum, is made entirely from archive footage and tells the story of a US airman and two reporters struggling to document the Uprising taking place around them. Warsaw ’44 (Miasto ’44), co-produced by the Museum, is a fictionalized depiction of the Uprising, paying homage to the young men who valiantly defended their homeland.

Today the Museum is not only one of Warsaw’s most popular tourist attractions, it is also a moving monument to Poland’s wartime struggle for survival.

This is the second in a series of articles about museums in Poland. Our next brochure will feature the European Solidarity Center in Gdańsk. 18 p c i - N Y 201 5 | film THE RETURN

Highlighting the revival of Jewish Life in contemporary Poland, The Return, directed by Adam Zucker, explores the intertwined lives of four young women engaging with Judaism in Poland today, each in a different way. The film follows their struggle to create a living Jewish identity and community in the country that was once the epicenter of the Jewish world. Over a four-year period, Zucker followed the story through five cities, three continents, two weddings, two babies, a new citizenship and a conversion. Taken together, these rich narrative storylines create a fascinating tapestry of a community struggling to understand questions of identity, in this case: what does it really mean to be Jewish?

The film had its sold-out world premiere at the October 2014 Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York City (at the American Museum of Natural History), followed by sold-out screenings at the Jewish Film Festival of Argentina (Opening Night Film), the Boston Jewish Film Festival, the Cucalorus Film Festival, DOC NYC and The Museum of Jewish Heritage (New York). At time of printing, the film had received coverage in The Times of Israel, Jewish Week, Jewniverse and Pagina 12.

The Return was funded in part by The Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, the Koret Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Kronhill-Pletka Foundation, and the Foundation for Jewish Culture.

The Return will continue to screen across the United States (and beyond) in 2015. In early 2015 the film will be screening at The Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, the largest Jewish film festival in the country. Other upcoming screenings will include prominent Jewish Film Festivals in Washington DC, The East Bay (Oakland, CA), Palm Springs and the Jewish Film Festival of Australia.

More about the film: www.thereturndocumentary.com

Lynn and Jules Kroll Fund for Jewish Documentary Film visual arts| pci-NY 2015 19 retrieving looted polish works of art By Monika Kuhnke and Wojciech Kowalski

Poland suffered huge cultural losses in the Second World War. Over 500,000 historic objects were destroyed or dispersed. Though large in scale, the search campaign mounted by the “Polish Monuments Men” led to the identification and return to Poland of only a fraction of the missing works of art. The task was made even more difficult by the fact that many looted pieces had ended up in private hands, while others had been taken away by the Red Army. The latter became part of museum collections in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

For a number of years following the war, the recovery of Polish cultural objects was not raised for political reasons. It was not until the transition of the 1980s and 1990s that the problem was put back on the agenda. Registers of missing pieces were re-examined, catalogues of losses were reissued, talks with Germany and Russia were opened, and—most importantly— searches for the lost works of art were launched. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland has been playing an active part in these search and recovery efforts.

Works of art looted in Poland during the war made their way to private and public collections in the United States, among other countries. Provenance research has been ongoing in American museums for several years now, leading to the identification and return to Poland of valuable paintings stolen from the National Museum in Warsaw (The Holy Trinity, dating from the 16th c., found at the Vizcaya Museum in Miami), and from the Gołuchów Museum (Portrait of a Courtier by Jan Mostaert, 16th c., discovered at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond). The Czartoryski Museum in Kraków regained a very rare Persian tapestry dating from the 16th century (found at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

Valuable objects of Polish origin have also been identified on the US antique market. In 2001, a 16th-century marble statue, probably by Giovanni Padovano, emerged in New York (part of the National Museum in Warsaw’s holdings). A manuscript originally belonging to the Wrocław 20 p c i - N Y 201 5 | visual arts

City Library was returned in 2009 after being put up for auction. Two paintings by the Polish artist Julian Fałat (The Battue Hunt in Nieśwież and Before Going Hunting in Rytwiany), as well as Flowers in a Glass Vase, probably by Jacob van Walscapelle, were returned to the National Museum in Warsaw by private collectors from the US.

Notable works won back in other countries include the paintings Peasants in an Inn by Adriaen Brouwer (recovered from the United Kingdom), and Woman in an Armchair by Charles-François Hutin (recovered from France), as well as the medieval sculpture Seated Madonna and Child, which was found in the Czech Republic and had originally hung in a church in the town of Nysa. A collection of 34 valuable manuscripts and incunabula (13th-17th c.) were returned from the Czech Republic, works which the Jewish Theological Seminary Library in Wrocław had lost during World War II.

Madonna Under the Fir Tree by Lucas Cranach the Elder is without a doubt the most precious work regained by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 1989. Originally part of the collection of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Wrocław, the painting was substituted with an imitation and removed from the church by a German priest after the cessation of hostilities. It was only in July 2012 that Cranach’s masterpiece was reclaimed from Switzerland.

The recovery of a work of art can be a very challenging and protracted process. It always begins with a piece of information—reliable or probable—about its current whereabouts. We therefore appeal to you to come forward with any knowledge you may have about lost cultural property. Even seemingly-unimportant information can set off the process of restitution. If you have any information of this kind, please let us know at: [email protected] or [email protected].

The tireless efforts of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland (search for “looted art” at msz.gov.pl/en) to counter cultural losses during World War II are complemented by the restitution work of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage Division For Looted Art. It has been gathering information and cataloguing wartime cultural property losses from within the post-1945 borders of Poland as well as taking action to recover found objects. An extensive collection of information regarding the looted works of art and cultural heritage is available online at lootedart.gov.pl/en.

22 p c i - N Y 201 5 | music AGATA ZUBEL January, May and December 2015

In January, singer and composer Agata Zubel will participate in Project TenFourteen: a series of four programs performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP), featuring world premieres commissioned from ten distinctive composers. On January 25, Zubel will perform the world premiere of her new work where to at Cal Performances Herz Hall in Berkeley.

Zubel will return to the U.S. in May and December 2015 for concerts in New York presented in partnership with VisionIntoArt (VIA). VIA creates and commissions multidisciplinary works in collaboration with emerging and established artists, scientists, conservationists and others, and is presented worldwide. VIA’s works have been performed at Lincoln Center, the Barbican, the Atlas Theater, HIFA, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Kennedy Center, along with residencies at MASS MoCA and the Park Avenue Armory. VIA’s FERUS Festival presents projects with an emphasis on cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Agata Zubel (born in 1978 in Wrocław, Poland) is an award-winning composer and vocalist. Her repertoire is broad, ranging from Caccini and Vivaldi to works by Berg, Copland, Schnittke, Schoenberg and Sciarrino as well as contemporary Polish composers. She has received numerous awards for her compositions, including the top award at the 60th UNESCO International Composers’ Rostrum in May 2013 for Not I, which also received the Polonica Nova prize in 2014. She has worked with the Klangforum Wien, the London Sinfonietta, the Seattle Chamber Players and others. She has received commissions from Deutsche Welle, the Wratislavia Cantans Festival, Sacrum Profanum Festival in Kraków and the Ultraschall Festival in Berlin, among others.

Support for Agata Zubel comes from the Polish Cultural Institute New York. WQXR-Q2 Music is the digital partner of the FERUS Festival. FILM| p c i - N Y 201 5 23 IDA

Ever since its win at the 2013 Gdynia Film Festival and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 38th Toronto International Film Festival last year, Ida, directed by Paweł Pawlikowski has been showered with awards both in Poland and internationally. Ida tells the story of 18-year old Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), a sheltered orphan raised in a convent, who is preparing to become a nun. But her Mother Superior insists she first visit her sole living relative: her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a worldly and cynical Communist Party insider, who shocks her with the revelation that her real name is Ida, that she is Jewish, and her parents were murdered during the German occupation. This revelation triggers a heart-wrenching journey to discover her parents’ fate—to the countryside, the family home, and deep into the secrets of the past that have been suppressed by post-war Communism. Director Paweł Pawlikowski writes: “Ida is a film about identity, family, faith, guilt, socialism, and music. I wanted to make a film about history that wouldn’t feel like a historical film; a film which is moral, but has no lessons to offer; I wanted to tell a story in which ‘everyone has their reasons’; a story closer to poetry than plot. Most of all, I wanted to steer clear of the usual rhetoric of Polish cinema. The Poland in Ida is shown by an ‘outsider’ with no axe to grind, filtered through personal memory and emotion, the sounds and images of childhood.”

Ida has been nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. Ida is also Poland’s submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2015. The final nominees will be announced in January 2015. It won the 2014 Best European Film Award and People’s Choice Award at the European Film Awards, as well as the 2014 Spotlight Award by the American Society of Cinematographers, the Golden Trailer Award, Best Feature Film at the 15th Polish Film Festival in Los Angeles, Best Foreign Language Film at the 2014 New York Film Critics Circle Awards and Best Foreign Language Film at the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards. Director Paweł Pawlikowski received the Best European Director Award and the Best European Screenwriter Award along with Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Łukasz Żal and Ryszard Lenczewski received the Best European Cinematographer Award—Prix Carlo di Palma from the European Film Academy for cinematography on the film.Ida had its New York Premiere at the 23rd New York Jewish Film Festival in January 2014 and was shown at BAM in New York in February, as part of the PCI NY KINO POLSKA series. (For screenings in the US in 2015, please visit www.ida-movie.com.) 24 p c i - N Y 201 5 | film Obscure Pleasures: the films of Walerian Borowczyk By Daniel Bird April 2015

Master craftsman, Dadaist prankster and unrepentant sensualist, Walerian Borowczyk and his films have yet to be widely discovered and appreciated.

After its success in the UK, a retrospective of the work of Walerian Borowczyk will take place at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on April 2-9, 2015, in partnership with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U. S. and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

Borowczyk was born in Poland in 1923 and trained as a painter and sculptor. He went on to work as a poster artist before starting a career as an animator and filmmaker. After moving to France in the late 1950s, Borowczyk produced a succession of startling, often funny short films that were as innovative as they were provocative. When Borowczyk made the transition to feature films, he joined the ranks of the masters of world cinema.

Not only was he a trailblazer for fine artists working in film, but he also brought a keen, painterly eye to framing and shooting objects, animals and bodies. Since the late 1960s Borowczyk has left an indelible stamp on a whole generation of writers, artists and filmmakers. Feminist author Angela Carter considered his filmGoto, Isle of Love one of her favorites; his animations were a key influence on Terry Gilliam; and his graphic design inspired both the poster designer Andrzej Klimowski and the artist Craigie Horsfield. Borowczyk’s approach to cinema harked back to the silent films of George Méliès, Buster Keaton and Sergei Eisenstein, and even pre-cinema artists such as Eadward Muybridge’s chrono-photography and the praxinoscope of Charles-Émile Reynaud. From the outset, Borowczyk favored fantasy, and erotic themes in his work grew more pronounced with the relaxation of censorship. This eroticism allowed his detractors to marginalize him, but in fact his films show a distinctly moral sensibility, satirizing the corruption of feudal, ecclesiastical and bureaucratic institutions.

For a full schedule of screenings, please visit www.polishculture-nyc.org in March 2015.

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Camera Obscura: Short Films (1957 – 1964) Poland, France 1957 – 1964. 90 min. Digital. EST. A selection of early shorts, French commercials and animation, which established Borowczyk as a major talent when first screened in Paris in 1965.

Lanterna Magica: Short Films (1965 – 1984) France 1965 – 1984. 90 min. Digital. EST. A program of juxtapositions: animation and live action, music and images, and crossing genres. Includes some of Borowczyk’s intimate portraits of artists at work. [Photo: facing page, bottom, from Gavotte.]

Theater of Mr. and Mrs. Kabal (Théâtre de Monsieur et Madame Kabal) France 1967. 73 min. Digital. EST. Borowczyk’s only animated feature film—a surreal reflection on married life, set in a barren wasteland thinly populated by exotic flora and fauna.

Goto, Isle of Love (Goto, l’île d’amour) France 1968. With Guy Saint-Jean, Pierre Brasseur, Ligia Branice. 93 min. Digital. EST. A petty thief works his way up the hierarchy of an imaginary remote island in hopes of stealing the ruling dictator’s wife away from him. Featuring bizarre imagery, poetic color and the creative use of Handel’s organ concertos. [Photo: page 29, top.]

Blanche France 1971. With Ligia Branice, Michel Simon, Georges Wilson. 92 min. Digital. EST. When an amorous king pays a visit to Blanche, the young, beautiful wife of a senile baron, he falls under her spell. Filmed to resemble a medieval fresco and featuring musical arrangements from Carmina Burana. [Photo: pages 24-25.]

Immoral Tales (Contes immoraux) France 1974. With Fabrice Luchini, Charlotte Alexandra, Paloma Picasso, Florence Bellamy 103 min. Digital. EST. A veritable cavalcade of immorality spread over four historical tales and featuring cosmic, transcendental and transgressive acts of every kind. [Photo: page 29, middle.]

The Story of Sin (Dzieje grzechu) Poland 1975. With Grażyna Długołęcka, Jerzy Zelnik, Olgierd Łukaszewicz. 124 min. 35mm. EST. Ewa’s passion for a married man takes her on a perilous journey across 20th century Europe. The film casts a critical eye on conventional morality. [Photo: facing page, top.]

The Beast (La Bête) France 1975. With Sirpa Lane, Lisbeth Humel, Guy Trejan, Marcel Dalio. 104 min. Digital. EST. A venal French aristocrat tries to save his crumbling mansion by marrying off his deformed son to a nymphomaniac American heiress. An erotic black comedy drawing on legends of werewolves. [Photo: facing page, middle.]

28 p c i - N Y 201 5 | film

The Margin (La Marge) France 1976. With Sylvia Kristel, Joe Dallesandro. 95 min. 35mm. EST. An uptight salesman loses himself in the arms of an ethereal prostitute, in a headlong rush towards the end of the night. Featuring Sylvia Kristel and Warhol favorite Joe Dallesandro, and music by 10cc, Chopin, Elton John and Pink Floyd.

Behind Convent Walls (Interno di un convento) Italy 1977. With Ligia Branice, Howard Ross, Marina Pierro. 95 min. 35mm. EST. A comic exploration of the tensions between the spirit and the flesh in an Italian convent. Featuring striking hand-held cinematography.

Private Collections (Collections privées) France 1978. Dir. Just Jaeckin, Terayama Suji, Walerian Borowczyk. With Laura Gemser, Juzo Itami, Marie-Catherine Conti. 100 min. 35mm. EST. A portmanteau film curated by legendary French producer Pierre Braunberger, featuring some of the top erotic filmmakers of the 1970s. Includes Borowczyk’s adaptation of “The Wardrobe” by Guy de Maupassant.

Immoral Women (Les Héroïnes du mal) France 1979. With Marina Pierro, Gaëlle Legrand, Pascale Christophe. 35mm. A film in three parts which brings together tales of women in different historical eras who use their sexuality to triumph over the men that oppress them.

Lulu Germany 1980. With Anne Bennent, Michele Placido, Udo Kier. 35mm. Based on the Lulu plays by Frank Wedekind, Borowczyk presents a terse, stripped-back account of the eponymous anti-heroine. Filmed in a series of stylized sets designed by the director himself, Borowczyk's Lulu is a cool erotic fantasy played out inside a doll's house.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (Le cas étrange de Dr. Jekyll et Miss Osbourne) France 1981. With Udo Kier, Marina Pierro, Patrick Magee, Howard Vernon. 95 min. DIGITAL EST. Henry Jekyll plunges into a bath of chemicals and emerges as the sexually voracious Mr. Hyde. A masterpiece of surrealist cinema, Borowczyk mischievously flits between violent farce, bloody delirium and erotic frenzy. [Photo: facing page, bottom.]

Love Rites (Cérémonie d'amour) France 1987. With Marina Pierro, Mathieu Carrière. 35mm. 100 min. EST. A vain, preening clothes buyer is spiritually consumed by a demonic prostitute.

A Dazzling Imagination (2014) UK 2014. Dir. Daniel Bird. With Walerian Borowczyk, André Heinrich, Dominique Duvergé. 90min. EST. A documentary featuring Borowczyk discussing his approach towards graphic arts and filmmaking, footage of the director at work, and testimonies from cast and crew.

“Boro: L'Île d'amour,” edited by Kamila Kuc, Kuba Mikurda and Michał Oleszczyk, will be published by Berghahn Books in August 2015. It is the first English-language academic work devoted entirely to the work of Walerian Borowczyk, including a short biography by Kuba Mikurda.

30 p c i - N Y 201 5 | theater Ida Kamińska By Joanna Krakowska Summer 2015

In 1913, Abraham Kamiński opened the first permanent, professional Jewish theater in Warsaw, performing both Jewish plays and world classics. The star of this theater was Ester Rachel Kamińska, known as the “mother of Jewish theater.” Their daughter, Ida Kamińska, born in 1899, made her debut at five years old on her parents’ stage, and after their deaths she continued their work. Her artistic achievements were renowned far beyond Warsaw, Poland and even Europe. Before the Second World War she and Zygmunt Turkow co-founded the famous Warsaw Artistic Jewish Theater. After the war, which she survived in exile in Kyrgyzstan, she returned to Poland, where for twenty years she ran the Ester Rachel Kamińska Jewish Theater. In 1968 she left Poland for the United States. She died in New York in 1980.

Ida Kamińska was both a great artist—actress, director, translator—and a great theater manager. Under her leadership, the Jewish Theater operated within the system of political entanglements and propaganda in Communist Poland, but at the same time celebrated great artistic achievements. Ida Kamińska enjoyed unusual respect and admiration in the Polish theater community. As an actress she became equally famous for her roles in Yiddish plays, such as Mirele Efros by Jacob Gordin, Polish plays, such as Meir Ezofowicz by Eliza Orzeszkowa, and the international repertory, such as Trees Die Standing Tall by Alejandro Casona.

The Polish theater critic Jan Kott was delighted by her portrayal of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage, writing: “Mother Courage in Ida Kamińska’s interpretation accepts the world with all its cruelty, but knows full well there’s nothing for it but to keep pulling her wagon onwards. Contrary to all the logic of the world, even contrary to what’s obvious. […] Ida Kamińska is one of the greatest contemporary tragic actresses. But this time she didn’t need to learn her role. She was and is a Jewish Mother Courage.” In 1966 she was nominated for an Oscar for her role in the Czechoslovak film The Shop on Main Street. But it’s worth remembering this wasn’t her first movie shown in America—Kamińska had acted in many Yiddish films produced in Poland, which had been shown on American screens as early as before the First World War.

While managing the State Jewish Theater in Warsaw, Ida Kamińska yearned for it not to be treated like a museum or ethnographic display, but as a living theater taking its rightful place in the dramatic life of Poland. That’s why she emphasized the artistic values of the Jewish Theater, rather than its cultural identity. Her ambition was to make art, not to spin nostalgic tales. She said: “We want to be yet another good theater in Poland—while maintaining our specific character, language and temperament.”

Polish critics have written frequently and extensively about performances at the Jewish Theater. But historians of Polish theater have in general overlooked it in their histories. It’s time to change that: the first history of public theater in Poland where the Jewish theater takes its rightful place is yet to be published. More historical research on Jewish theater in Poland is needed. We all await the publication of a biography of Ida Kamińska.

32 p c i - N Y 201 5 | theater our class April 2015

Following tremendous success at London’s National Theater, Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater, and recognition in Israel and all over Europe, the play Our Class (Nasza Klasa) by Tadeusz Słobodzianek comes to The Temple Emanu-El Skirball Center for a one-night-only staged reading featuring a stellar cast of well-known Broadway, film and television actors. Making its New York City premiere on Holocaust Remembrance Week, the Nike award-winning Polish play unveils the long-hidden truth behind the massacre in Jedwabne, Poland in 1941.

“Our Class doesn't try to teach anyone. This story is told to provoke questions. The drama, referring to the events in eastern Poland, is a universal story understood in places where deep ethnical conflicts arise and private life must conform to politics.”—Ondrej Spišák, director of Polish production of Our Class

Set in a Polish classroom made up of both Jewish and Christian classmates, Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s gripping play exposes the effects of war, betrayal, cruelty and repression. The staged reading will be directed by Cosmin Chivu, Assistant Professor and Director of the BA International Performance Ensemble Pace School of Performing Arts.

The cast will include legendary actor and director, Alvin Epstein; Tony Award winner Nina Arianda, and Screen Actors’ Guild Award winner Hunter Parrish.

Following the performance, the award-winning playwright and theater director Tadeusz Słobodzianek will speak about his creative process and will answer questions from the audience.

To contextualize the play and help the audience better understand its meaning, a preshow seminar will be conducted by Dr. Irena Grudzińska-Gross, a Princeton University professor and celebrated scholar of Jewish Studies whose research focuses on issues of war, violence, and nationalist ideologies in East-Central Europe in the 20th century. theater| p c i - N Y 201 5 33 (A)POLLONIA

This new anthology of plays—(A)pollonia: Twenty-First Century Polish Drama and Texts for the Stage (2014), edited by Krystyna Duniec, Joanna Klass, and Joanna Krakowska for Seagull Books— is a gift to English-speaking audiences on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of public theater in Poland. This anthology, a collection of contemporary Polish drama and writing for the stage, brings together uniquely Polish plays that simultaneously address the most pressing issues of today’s world and explore the ethics and politics of history and identity. The subjects range from the fate of the Jewish population in Poland during World War II, the consequences of war and postwar displacements, to issues of gender identity, same-sex desire, post-colonialism, collaboration with the Communist regime, and life in a free-market economy. In many cases, they bring to light matters that have, until now, been neglected or suppressed.

The anthology contains different types of dramatic texts: more or less traditional theater plays like Dorota Masłowska’s No Matter How Hard We Tried or We Exist on the Best Terms We Can; staged “docudramas” based on fact like Transfer! by Dunja Funke, Sebastian Majewski and Jan Klata; and new genre of creative adaptations like Diamonds Are the Coal That Got Down to Business by Paweł Demirski, based on Uncle Vanya and found-footage texts for the stage that draw on and adapt a wealth of often diverse literary sources. One such piece is the script to Krzysztof Warlikowski’s (A)pollonia, built from excerpts from Greek tragedies, novels by Jonathan Littell and J.M. Coetzee, and reportage by Hanna Krall. The title, (A)pollonia—a play on Poland’s Latin name, Polonia—represents the conflicts and dilemmas addressed by all the plays in the collection, and which have dominated Polish drama of the last decade.

Kathleen Cioffi, of Princeton University Press, writes that the plays collected in this volume represent trends in both Polish theater and Polish thought that should fascinate English- speaking readers interested in theater and Eastern Europe. These plays show Polish theater continuing to experiment with many different genres, unafraid of mixing comedy with serious philosophical questions, a fine sense of irony, and deep historical insight, and finding the universal in particular stories.

The book is distributed in the US by Chicago University Press. 34 p c i - N Y 201 5 | literature BookExpo America May 2015

In May of each year, the Polish Cultural Institute New York partners with the Polish Book Institute to exhibit the latest and greatest of Polish literature at BookExpo America, the largest book fair in the United States. Taking place since 2009 in New York’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, BEA brings together over 800 authors and over 1,000 exhibitors to showcase new titles and upcoming books, as well as bringing together people from across the spectrum of the publishing industry. Exhibitors include major American and international publishers, as well as libraries, booksellers, distributors, designers, technology companies and others. Countries and national cultural institutes also take the opportunity to promote their authors and publishers, both for those interested in bringing their literature to the United States and for those bringing American literature abroad.

In addition to being an opportunity to showcase high-quality literature, BEA is a key forum for buying and selling book rights to publishers in the US and abroad. Catching the recent surge in popularity of literature in translation in the United States, BEA has focused on promoting world literature, now including a special “translation market” in the exhibition, and in 2014 running a special program of events related to literature in translation.

Each year the Polish Cultural Institute New York and the Book Institute have invited an author to join us at BEA to promote their work. In 2014 we had the honor of welcoming Mariusz Szczygieł to celebrate the English translation of his book Gottland (Melville House Press, 2014), along with his translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Szczygieł is one of the leading voices in contemporary Polish reportage, a genre made famous by the work of the author and journalist Ryszard Kapuściński. Szczygieł, formerly the host of Poland’s first television talk show, is the author of several books as well as edited anthologies of Polish reportage. He is a co-founder of the Reportage Institute, which supports and promotes creative non-fiction writing and is republishing a series of forgotten classics of Polish reportage. Gottland received widespread critical acclaim in the United States and the Polish Cultural Institute New York will continue to focus on promoting Polish reportage in 2015.

BEA 2015 will take place May 27-29. In addition, for those interested in getting a behind-the- scenes peek at the publishing industry at work, the show will open to the public on May 30-31. Readers will be able to attend talks and book signings and meet some of their favorite authors.

All the books featured in this brochure will also be displayed on the Polish stand. 36 p c i - N Y 201 5 | visual arts Erna Rosenstein: I can repeaT only unconsciously

Erna Rosenstein: I Can Repeat Only Unconsciously is an in-depth monograph on the work of this surrealist painter and poet. It contains writings about the artist’s oeuvre and her life, as well as numerous reproductions of her art. This thorough analysis in book form allows the reader to uncover the intricacies of post-war art, not only in Poland, but also in Europe through the journey of an artist and a Jewish woman in the 20th century.

This book grew out of an exhibition organized by the authors Dorota Jarecka and Barbara Piwowarska, along with Andrzej Przywara at the Foksal Gallery Foundation and the Avant-Garde Institute in Warsaw in 2011. This is an expansion on that show, presenting rare documents, photographs and artworks lending a wealth of knowledge about the artist’s process, oeuvre and her life.

Erna Rosenstein was born in 1913 in Lviv but spend her youth in Vienna and Kraków. She endured a long life of many political changes including the Second World War, Stalinism, Communism, and everything in between. In the mid-1930s, she became involved with the avant-garde Kraków Group circle. She suffered during the War, witnessing the tragic murder of her parents. She survived, but had to start over from scratch. Her first exhibition took place at the Galeria Krzywe Koło in 1958 in Warsaw. Surrealism was a way for her to express and manifest her subconscious. Jarecka and Piwowarska write:

The art of Erna Rosentein is stretched between the work of the consciousness – which saves the integrity of the individual and which protects it from falling into impotence or melancholy – and an area which can neither be controlled nor named, which continuously releases all that is new and still unknown. It may be said that Rosenstein has a conscious approach to the unconscious, something that she perhaps owed to her early Surrealist interests.

The book is important not only for being the first in-depth analysis of Erna Książka ta jest ważna nie tylko jako pierwsze gruntowne opracowanie twórczo- Rosenstein’s art. It also inspires us to consider the very form of a monograph. ści Erny Rosenstein. Stanowi też inspirację dla myślenia o formule monografii. It is a dynamic story based mainly on the curatorial activities of two authors To dynamiczna opowieść dwóch współpracujących ze sobą i przyjaźniących się who are friends and collaborators. Meticulously researched and written in autorek, oparta w dużej mierze na ich kuratorskiej działalności. Napisana blisko close proximity to the artist’s work, it is also a work of great freedom, including dzieła artystki, z wykorzystaniem bogatego zaplecza erudycyjnego, dbałością scintillating associations and accounts of what touches them in her art. o fakty, ale i swobodą pozwalającą na błyskotliwe skojarzenia i zdanie relacji z tego, co porusza. Prof. Agata Jakubowska, Ph.D Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań Prof. dr hab. Agata Jakubowska Instytut Historii Sztuki, Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu

Postwar art had no illusions – the time of utopia was over. Culture had been deprived of its rational props, and was terrified by its own powerlessness. Sztuka powojenna nie miała już złudzeń, czas utopii się skończył. Kultura With few exceptions, it banished the horror of war from memory, refusing została pozbawiona racjonalnego sztafażu, lecz przerażona jeszcze własną nie- to show it in explicit forms. One exception can be found in the work of Erna mocą nie dopuszczała, poza wyjątkami, aby w bezpośrednich kształtach ujawnił Rosenstein. While she drew her artistic and political radicalism from the się zepchnięty w niepamięć koszmar wojny. Takim wyjątkowym przykładem Krakow Group, her tragic experience of war as a Jew in hiding, witnessing the była twórczość Erny Rosenstein, która swój artystyczny i polityczny radykalizm murder of both her parents, resulted in an art burdened by the nightmare of wyniosła z Grupy Krakowskiej, a tragiczne doświadczenie wojny, ukrywającej memory. Her drawings, paintings, objects and verses are stamped with the się Żydówki, na której oczach zostało zamordowanych oboje rodziców, obciążyło tragedy of death. They are suffused with everyday absence. They are filled with sztukę koszmarem pamięci. Jej rysunki, obrazy, przedmioty i wiersze nazna- the persistently returning scream of her mother. A scream remembered in the czone są tragedią śmierci. Przesiąknięte codzienną nieobecnością. Wypełnione banality of extraordinary objects or shrouded in the pale light of nocturnal wielokrotnie powracającym krzykiem matki. Krzykiem zapamiętanym w banal- scenes. A scream that takes over an injured body or invades forlorn forms that ności niesamowitych przedmiotów, krzykiem ukrytym w poświacie nokturnów, bleed. “I shut my eyes – because I want to see,” the artist wrote in one of her wdzierającym się w kaleczone ciało, w formy bezdomne ociekające krwią. verses. „Zamknęłam oczy – chcę widzieć”, pisała artystka w jednym z wierszy.

Prof. Andrzej Turowski, Ph.D Prof. dr hab. Andrzej Turowski

Professor Emeritus, Department of Art History, University of Burgundy in Dijon ISBN 978-83-89302-25-0 Profesor emeritus, Wydział Historii Sztuki, Uniwersytet Burgundzki w Dijon

The monograph is published by the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw, 2014 and is distributed by the gallery. visual Arts| pci-NY 2015 37 Avoiding Intermediary States. Andrzej Wróblewski (1927–1957)

Andrzej Wróblewski (1927–1957) was one of the most unusual artists of the 20th century. Dying prematurely at the age of thirty, in only a single decade he created an oeuvre bursting with a revolutionary aesthetic, informed by his political and social activism. Wróblewski was a political artist who made attempts to inculcate his artistic ideas into society through his work and life. His uncompromising devotion to the theory of art resulted in his alienation from the artistic community, while his chosen attitude towards life—dissenting from the top-down status quo, with a sense of mission to shape new art and thus the new post-war reality— bred frustration. Wróblewski was filled with a sense of the inseparability of art and life, the constant tension caused by the contrast between creative acts and mundane functioning within society.

Avoiding Intermediary States. Andrzej Wróblewski (1927–1957) is a source book offering critical reflection on Wróblewski's work in light of attempts to establish new interpretations of his ten-year practice. Starting with experiments with geometrical abstraction in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Wróblewski moved to observant, direct presentation of human degradation in his works starting in 1949, before finally reaching clear, subject-oriented art with a broad social impact, devoid of distortion, photographic in character and in keeping with the imagination of the ordinary viewer. This comprehensive bilingual monograph presents a new reading of Wróblewski's work, taking into account his multidimensional practice—also as an art historian, critic and a commentator on present-day artistic life.

Avoiding Intermediary States. Andrzej Wróblewski (1927–1957) is a collection of analysis, archival material, photographs and documents, collected notes and unpublished manuscripts, reconstructions of his exhibitions, and essays by authors such as Magdalena Ziółkowska, the director of Kraków’s Bunkier Sztuki, Charles Esche, curator of the 31st São Paulo Bienal, Eckhart Gillen, the author of German Art from Beckmann to Richter, and Wróblewski himself. The publication also features color reproductions of works previously only known from black- and-white photographs, as well as lost or destroyed works, amounting to 500 reproductions of Wróblewski's work.

The monograph is published by the Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2014 and co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. 38 p c i - N Y 201 5 | visual arts: DESIGN RESIDENCIES Spring 2015

Paweł Grobelny designs furniture, street furniture, interiors, installations for public spaces and architectural art interventions. He is particularly interested in the theory of design, participating in scientific conferences, lecturing at universities, and writing for design magazines as well as curating design exhibitions.

He enjoys site-specific urban space projects. His most recent installation is theout-door-kino cinema adjacent to the Strombeek Cultural Center in Strombeek, Belgium. This outdoor movie theater offers shelter and 24-hour access to the video installation in the gallery space. He has created urban furniture for Zhongshan Park in Shanghai, the Albertine Garden in Brussels, and also for the Cultural Centre in Grimbergen, Belgium. Currently he is working on an award-winning design of outdoor furniture for the French town of Mont-de-Marsan and for Poznań's historic Chwaliszewo neighborhood.

Paweł Grobelny as exhibitions curator promotes Polish designers. He is the co-curator of a series of exhibitions entitled "Unpolished. Young Design from Poland" and "Polished Up. Design from Poland," promoting Polish design outside the country. He was commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland to design the interiors of the Polish Institutes in Brussels, Madrid, Vienna and Kiev (2008 – 2014). Since 2009, he has been the curator and co-curator of more than twenty design exhibitions in Europe. He has received numerous international awards, including the Radio Star France award during last year's Paris Design Week. music/humanities| p c i - N Y 201 5 39 RESEARCH TRIPS

Every year the Polish Cultural Institute New York organizes research trips to Poland for professionals affiliated with American cultural institutions. These visits offer opportunities to develop in-depth knowledge of Polish music, literature, art, history and the performing arts and to meet artists and professional counterparts in person.

In 2014, Anna Perzanowska, Music Expert at the Polish Cultural Institute New York, organized a music research trip around the Warsaw Autumn Festival. The visit offered an immersion into the sounds of contemporary Polish music, its festivals, ensembles, presenters, and most importantly to the passionate voices from all generations of Polish composers. The 57th edition of the Warsaw Autumn Festival featured new compositions written for historical and rarely-used instruments, exploring the timbral and technical capabilities of these instruments enriching the language of modern music. The program was presented by such accomplished ensembles as Sinfonia Varsovia, baroque orchestra Arte dei Suonatori, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the New Music Orchestra (Orkiestra Muzyki Nowej) and featured works by Agata Zubel, Marcin Stańczyk, Wojtek Blecharz, Cezary Duchnowski, Zygmunt Krauze, Hanna Kulenty, Kazimierz Serocki and many others. Guests on the research trip also had a chance to visit Kraków and get acquainted with the Sacrum Profanum Festival. The Festival launched in 2003 and presents new trends in classical and alternative music. Each edition of the Festival presents works of composers from a particular region and has featured acclaimed ensembles and musicians such as Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, the London Sinfonietta, the Kronos Quartet, Laurie Anderson, Kraftwerk, and Apex Twin.

In addition, Sean Bye, our Literature and Humanities Expert, hosted a group of American journalists for the formal opening of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The museum, which covers 1,000 years of Jewish history in Poland, was opened on Oct 28, 2014 by President Bronisław Komorowski of Poland and President Reuven Rivlin of Israel. Working closely with the Taube Foundation, our guests were able to take advantage of private tours of the museum’s Core Exhibition as well as interview leading members of the Museum curatorial staff, including chief curator Prof. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, chief historian Dr. Anthony Polonsky, Vice President of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute Marian Turski, and many others. They visited the Jewish Historical Institute, Nożyk Synagogue, the Warsaw Jewish Community Center, the Estera Rachel and Ida Kamińska Jewish Theater, toured the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto and got a real taste for both the vibrant history of Jewish life in Poland and the contemporary Jewish revival taking place in Poland today.

In 2015, the Polish Cultural Institute New York will organize a research trip for the North American presenters of world music, ethnomusicologists, and folklorists. The visit will include attending the Cross-Culture Festival in Warsaw and showcases of accomplished and emerging Polish artists. The Festival, founded in 2005, presents some of the most interesting artists working in the field of world culture and music today. This June, we also plan a research trip to Kraków for one the the Polish Book Institute’s occasional Seminars for International Publishers, introducing publishers from around the world to the latest and greatest in Polish literature through readings and meetings with Polish novelists, poets, playwrights and others, as well as editors and other professionals from the publishing world. ABOUT US

The Polish Cultural Institute New York, established in 2000, is a diplomatic mission to the United States serving under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland. The PCI New York is one of 24 such institutes around the world. It is also an active member of the network of the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC) in its New York cluster.

The Institute’s mission is to build, nurture, and promote cultural exchange between the United States and Poland by presenting Polish culture to American audiences and by connecting Polish artists, researchers and scholars from various fields to American institutions, introducing them to their professional counterparts in the United States, and facilitating their participation in contemporary American culture.

The Institute produces and promotes a broad range of cultural events in theater, performance, dance, music, film, visual arts, literature, and the humanities. Among its past and present American partners are such distinguished organizations as Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, PEN American Center, the Poetry Society of America, YIVO, the National Gallery of Art, Yale University, 92nd Street Y, Columbia University, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Princeton University, the Harvard Film Archive, the CUNY Graduate Center, the Julliard School of Music, Film Forum, the Museum of the Moving Image, the Morgan Library & Museum, Anthology Film Archives, The Santa Fe Opera, the New Museum, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Symphony Space, the New York Public Library, the Cinefamily, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Kennedy Center, and many more.

Our programs have included American presentations of works by such a wide range of distinguished artists, including filmmakers Agnieszka Holland, Roman Polański, Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Zanussi, Wojciech Jerzy Has, Walerian Borowczyk, Jerzy Skolimowski, Małgorzata Szumowska and Andrzej Żuławski; poets and authors Wisława Szymborska, Czesław Miłosz, Adam Zagajewski, Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Różewicz, Ryszard Kapuściński, Stanisław Lem, Witold Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz; composers Fryderyk Chopin, Karol Szymanowski, Mieczysław Weinberg, Andrzej Panufnik, Witold Lutosławski, Mikołaj Górecki, Krzysztof Penderecki, Agata Zubel, and Paweł Mykietyn; theater directors Tadeusz Kantor, Jerzy Grotowski, Krystian Lupa, Grzegorz Jarzyna and Krzysztof Warlikowski; visual artists Alina Szapocznikow, Mirosław Bałka, Katarzyna Kozyra, Paweł Althamer, Edward Krasiński, Zofia Kulik, Józef Robakowski, Zbigniew Libera, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Magdalena Abakanowicz; and many other Polish researchers and scholars, public intellectuals, and social and cultural activists.

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For any other communications related request, please contact Magdalena Mazurek-Nuovo at [email protected] The book is important not only for being the first in-depth analysis of Erna Książka ta jest ważna nie tylko jako pierwsze gruntowne opracowanie twórczo- Rosenstein’s art. It also inspires us to consider the very form of a monograph. ści Erny Rosenstein. Stanowi też inspirację dla myślenia o formule monografii. It is a dynamic story based mainly on the curatorial activities of two authors To dynamiczna opowieść dwóch współpracujących ze sobą i przyjaźniących się who are friends and collaborators. Meticulously researched and written in autorek, oparta w dużej mierze na ich kuratorskiej działalności. Napisana blisko close proximity to the artist’s work, it is also a work of great freedom, including dzieła artystki, z wykorzystaniem bogatego zaplecza erudycyjnego, dbałością scintillating associations and accounts of what touches them in her art. o fakty, ale i swobodą pozwalającą na błyskotliwe skojarzenia i zdanie relacji z tego, co porusza. Prof. Agata Jakubowska, Ph.D Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań Prof. dr hab. Agata Jakubowska Instytut Historii Sztuki, Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu

Postwar art had no illusions – the time of utopia was over. Culture had been deprived of its rational props, and was terrified by its own powerlessness. Sztuka powojenna nie miała już złudzeń, czas utopii się skończył. Kultura With few exceptions, it banished the horror of war from memory, refusing została pozbawiona racjonalnego sztafażu, lecz przerażona jeszcze własną nie- to show it in explicit forms. One exception can be found in the work of Erna mocą nie dopuszczała, poza wyjątkami, aby w bezpośrednich kształtach ujawnił Rosenstein. While she drew her artistic and political radicalism from the się zepchnięty w niepamięć koszmar wojny. Takim wyjątkowym przykładem Krakow Group, her tragic experience of war as a Jew in hiding, witnessing the była twórczość Erny Rosenstein, która swój artystyczny i polityczny radykalizm murder of both her parents, resulted in an art burdened by the nightmare of wyniosła z Grupy Krakowskiej, a tragiczne doświadczenie wojny, ukrywającej memory. Her drawings, paintings, objects and verses are stamped with the się Żydówki, na której oczach zostało zamordowanych oboje rodziców, obciążyło tragedy of death. They are suffused with everyday absence. They are filled with sztukę koszmarem pamięci. Jej rysunki, obrazy, przedmioty i wiersze nazna- the persistently returning scream of her mother. A scream remembered in the czone są tragedią śmierci. Przesiąknięte codzienną nieobecnością. Wypełnione banality of extraordinary objects or shrouded in the pale light of nocturnal wielokrotnie powracającym krzykiem matki. Krzykiem zapamiętanym w banal- scenes. A scream that takes over an injured body or invades forlorn forms that Cover: Polish National Ballet, Moving Rooms, chor. Krzysztof Pastor, dancer: Carlosności Martin niesamowitych przedmiotów, Perez, krzykiem ukrytym w poświacie nokturnów, bleed. “I shut my eyes – because I want to see,” the artist wrote in one of her wdzierającym się w kaleczone ciało, w formy bezdomne ociekające krwią. verses. photo: Ewa Krasucka. Passenger: P. 3: A scene from the Houston Grand Opera dress„Zamknęłam rehearsal oczy – chcę widzieć”, pisała artystka w jednym z wierszy. Prof. Andrzej Turowski, Ph.D Prof. dr hab. Andrzej Turowski Professor Emeritus, Department of Art History, University of Burgundy in Dijon ISBN 978-83-89302-25-0 of The Passenger, 1/15/14 ©Stephanie Berger; P. 5: Zofia Posmysz ©Jacek Poremba, Profesorcourtesy emeritus, Wydział Historii Sztuki, Uniwersytet Burgundzki w Dijon of Teatr Wielki Opera Narodowa. Unsound: PP. 6-7: Unsound 2014, photo by Camille Blake. Kantor: PP. 8-11: photos by Jerzy Borowski, courtesy of Cricoteka Archives/cricoteka.pl. Storylines: P. 13 from top: Installation view, Paweł Althamer: Almech, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Agnieszka Kurant, Phantom Library, 2011–12 (detail) ©Agnieszka Kurant, photo: Jean Vong, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Ballet: P. 15: Polish National Ballet, Moving Rooms, chor. Krzysztof Pastor, dancer: Carlos Martin Perez, photo: Ewa Krasucka. Museum: PP. 16-17: From the collection of Warsaw Rising Museum, www.1944.pl. The Return: P. 18: A still from The Return, courtesy of the filmmaker. Looted Art: P. 19: Jan Mostaert (1475–1555), Portrait of a Courtier, courtesy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland; P. 21: Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), Madonna under the Fir Tree, courtesy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland. Agata Zubel: P. 22: Warsaw Autumn 2014, photo: G. Mart. Ida: P. 23: Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) and Wanda (Agata Kulesza) in Ida, courtesy of Music Box Films. Borowczyk: PP. 24-25: A still from Blanche ©Ligia Borowczyk/CNC; P. 27 from top: A still from The Story of Sin photo courtesy of Filmoteka Narodowa; a still from The Beast ©Argos Films; a still from Gavotte ©Ligia Borowczyk/CNC; P. 29 from top: A still from Goto, Isle of Love ©Argos Films; a still from Immoral Tales photo ©Argos Films; a still from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne ©Arrow Films/Groupe AB. Ida Kamińska: P. 31: From the collection of Theater Institute Warsaw. Our Class: P. 32: Alvin Epstein courtesy of the actor; Nina Arianda courtesy of the actress; Hunter Parrish courtesy of the actor. (A)pollonia: P. 33: (A)pollonia book cover. BookExpo America: PP. 34-35: Mariusz Szczygieł ©K. Dubiel The Book Institute. Erna Rosenstein: P. 36: I Can Repeat Only Unconsciously book cover. Andrzej Wróblewski: P. 37: Photo: Łukasz Paluch, Courtesy of Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation. Residencies: P. 38: Paweł Grobelny, Monolit Bench, 2008, Jardin d'Albertine, Brussels, Belgium.

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