This right-wing populist government is driving many artists and museum curators to self-censor out of survival instinct, according to a recent study.
The study in question is a report titled “Cultural Control: Censorship and Suppression of the Arts in Poland,” that the Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI) wrote in partnership with UC Berkeley Law School and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.
In it, the three organizations explain how President Andrzej Duda’s party has turned culture into a political weapon serving Polish national identity.
With this in mind, he has installed his supporters at the helm of several major cultural institutions in Central Europe’s largest country.
In 2019, Małgorzata Ludwisiak was thus removed as director of the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, in favour of Piotr Bernatowicz.
His seven-year term, awarded without competition by the Minister of Culture, Piotr Gliński, has incurred the wrath of many members of the Polish artistic community.
The reason? They fear that Piotr Bernatowicz could promote the ideology of PiS in the programming of the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art.
And this is far from being an isolated case: Jaroslaw Suchan, head of the Muzeum Sztuki since 2006, was replaced without notice last May by Andrzej Biernacki.
This local gallery owner with no institutional experience is seeking to steer away from “pro-environmental, gender and queer art,” in line with the ultra-conservative ideology of the party in power.
Fear of ‘offending religious feelings’
Andrzej Duda’s government also uses the blasphemy law in Poland’s penal code to muzzle the country’s artistic community. The law states that it is forbidden to “offend religious feelings,” reflecting the prominence of the Catholic Church in the political arena.
The authors of the AFI report found that 146 cases of “offense to religious feelings” were filed with prosecutors’ offices in Poland in 2020, compared to 90 in 2018.
Some artists, such as the activist Elżbieta Podleśna, have borne the brunt of this situation.
This woman in her 50s was arrested in 2019 for depicting the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, a popular representation of Mary in Poland, with a halo in the rainbow colors of the LGBTQIA+ flag.
The Polish Interior Minister, Joachim Brudzinski, welcomed the move on Twitter, saying that: “No stories about freedom and ‘tolerance’ give ANYBODY the right to offend the feelings of believers.”
In the year 2000, the art historian and curator Anda Rottenberg came under fierce attack from parliamentarians from the nationalist right and conservative Catholic groups for allowing the curator Harald Szeemann to exhibit a sculpture by Maurizio Cattelan in the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. Entitled “La Nona Ora,” it represents Pope John Paul II crushed by a meteorite.
An oppressive system
These high-profile cases have caused widespread fear within the Polish artistic community, especially among LGBTQIA+ artists and cultural workers.
All fear the authoritarian policies of the PiS, which revive the not-so-distant memory of Joseph Pilsudski’s dictatorship. Some of them consciously or unconsciously restrain their artistic practice in order not to offend religious feelings or national symbols.
“I don’t know how many ideas I’ve reconsidered because I was tired and fed up and didn’t want to worry about someone showing up to my house to drag me to the prosecutor’s office,” said Marta Frej, cited in the AFI report.
The Artistic Freedom Initiative is calling on Polish and European Union lawmakers to mobilise in defence of the freedom of the country’s artists and cultural professionals before it’s too late.
“PiS is in power; they own everything. This system is very oppressive, and we haven’t yet experienced the full potential of the oppression. But it is approaching,” predicts a Polish art historian and curator, cited anonymously in the report.