sense of guilt which has been instilled in me - a Pole brought up in the Christian tradition. To be sure, I did not choose Jewish topics out of sentiment, but rather out of my own personal concern. Now it all seems easier to me, for I have processed those issues, I have named them. Jan Tomasz Gross was right when he said: ‘Poles should deal with this for their own sake, not for anybody else’s.’”
Wilhelm Sasnal’s exhibition at POLIN Museum - a modern, open institution of culture which does not shy away from posing difficult questions and from engaging its audience in personal interpretations and in a dialogue with history - will address the audiences interested in Polish-Jewish relations as well as all those who feel emotionally involved in the current affairs - in their social, political and poetic dimension. While inquiring into the meaning of the Polish landscape, the exhibition of Sasnal’s works at POLIN Museum poignantly addresses the formation of the nation’s identity, as mirrored in clichéd images of nature, projections of historical greatness and attendant resentments that bear on the totality of our experience of the present. The individual paintings remain ambiguous and open to interpretation, and yet brought together in one exhibition they convey a message to the Museum audience: our politics of memory will be personal rather than written by those in power, or else it will soon cease to exist altogether.
The exhibition is curated by Adam Szymczyk. In the years 2003-2014 he headed the Kunsthalle Basel, and in the years 2014-2017 he was Artistic Director of documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.
The exhibition is open until 10 January 2022.