The romanticism in the context of contemporary Polish art on the Holocaust

Caspar-David-Friedrich-Vorlesung,Öffentlicher Abendvortrag

Some contemporary artists from Poland have shown a keen interest in issues related to recent history, especially the Second World War era, Nazi crimes, the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. Artists have been questioning the realm of collective memory, history, identity and their meaning for the present. Some of them as Mirosław Bałka, Elżbieta Janicka, Karolina Freino, Rafał Jakubowicz ask about the ”scars of history“ and the ”ghosts of the past“. However, their interpretations of Shoah can be read as romantic. It is especially seen in works evoking memory of places and focusing on nature. They are characterized by a special aura and beauty – mourning, sad, melancholic, gloomy and uncanny. These works appear as ambivalent, because they reveal a kind of fascination by the Holocaust. On the other hand such art can be seen as fulfilling a symbolic burial.
Izabela Kowalczyk (Ph.D.) – an art and cultural historian, art critique and curator, a professor at The School of Humanities and Journalism in Poznań, Poland. She studied art history at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (1990 - 95), where she received her PhD, and gender studies at CEU in Budapest (1998). She attended the Summer Institute in Art History and Visual Studies University of Rochester, USA in 1999. She was in the Board of Advisers to the project the „Büro Kopernikus“ (Fachbeirates Fonds deutsch-polnische Kulturbegegnungen, Kulturstiftung des Bundes, 2003 - 2005). In 2008 / 2009 she conducted the Polish research for the exhibition Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (Vienna, Warsaw, main curator: Bojana Pejić).
Moderation: Dr. Marek Fiałek und Christin Klaus M. A.


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