I Could Live in Africa
Witte de With Center for Contemporary Arts, Rotterdam, Netherlands
In 1983, two years after martial law was enforced in Poland in reaction to growing social un-rest, Jacques de Koning, then a student, soon to become a recognized Dutch filmmaker, shot his first documentary – a tongue-in-cheek report on the Polish state seen through the eyes of the post-punk and reggae group, Izrael. This austere yet superbly directed clash of east and west, entitled ‘I Could Live in Africa’, lends its name to a group exhibition in Rotterdam’s Witte de With. Curated by Michał Wolinski, in collaboration with Nicolaus Schafhausen and Anne-Claire Schmitz, the exhibition which will travel to Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in July, offers a compelling image of the Polish art scene of the 1980s as a constellation of collectives and practices that emerged throughout the decade, propelled by the ever stronger grip of the authorities on publishing, recording and information circulation. With some twenty works scattered around, the show seems modest, perhaps even slapdash (one might search in vain for wall texts or extra information other than that featured in the press release), but it soon becomes evident that this medley of photographs, sculptures, paintings and archival material form a tale of thriving subcultures, related, above all, through sound and images.
The exhibition opens with documentation of performances by Zbigniew Libera, among them For Art (1982), showing the artist having his head voluntarily shaven at a time when it was commonly read as evidence of recent imprisonment. In fact, the piece proved prophetic; Libera was sentenced to prison for clandestine activity soon after the photos were taken.
Music was the binding element for much of the cultural activity of the ‘80s, with sanctioned but progressive festivals serving as a safety-valve for youth, under the watchful eye of the secret police. On occasion these micro-celebrations of freedom triggered forms of tribal be-haviour, as captured by Jozef Robakowski’s More Air! (1986), footage of a frantic pogo dance shot from amidst the raging crowd. ‘Music, Which Tattooed by Brain’ on the other hand, is an accumulation of self-made cassette covers assembled by Miroslaw Balka during the 1980s – evidence of a range of DIY formats, from bootlegging to cassette-swapping which served as collective-forging phenomena.
Art-zines simultaneously proliferated throughout the country and circumvented governmental control of publishing. Wroclaw’s ‘Luxus’, a mixture of hand-made drawing, stencil and collage, and featuring acerbic humour targeting the country’s economic situation, is available in facsimile for visitors to flick through in an interior setting that riffs on local cultural centres of the period, jazzed up with a hint of exoticism.
The only two paintings in the show hang on opposing walls. Both Marek Sobczyk’s Ganja (1981), depicting the leading figure of martial law, General Jaruzelski, against the backdrop of a Rastafarian flag, a thick joint-cum-tank barrel protruding from his mouth, and Wlodzimi-erz Pawlak’s Adolf Hitler (1986), showing the Nazi leader relaxing amidst tropical scenery, conjure up a perverse air of otherness, further heightened by Miroslaw Filonik’s Honolulu Baboon (1986), a life-size papier-mâché baboon sculpture set in a beach-like environment.
A similar aura accompanies the remake of collective Neue Bieriemiennost’s 1987 installation Jean Bedel Bokassa: here, an enormous headless black figure with a sixteen-metre-long phallus hoisted in the air serves as biting commentary on the thin line between celebration and downfall – Bokassa being the self-appointed president of the Central African Republic who led his country to bankruptcy through megalomaniac ceremonies. This shimmering metaphorical shift, even blurring, between the mundane and the exotic, reads against the grain of the popular punk slogan ‘no future’, pointing instead towards the actual as a site for the emergence of the possible. The social turbulence that triggered the political transformation of the late 1980s also marked the end of life in a state of limbo. ‘Living in Africa’ suddenly came within reach, as proven by Libera, a symbolical closure to the exhibition, who set out for Egypt and Sudan soon after the first democratic elections of 1989.
Krzysztof Kosciuczuk
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