Poland Announces Artist Change for 2024 Venice Biennale

Ignacy Czwartos, who was to represent Poland at the upcoming Sixtieth Venice Biennale, has been removed in favor of the Ukrainian collective Open Group. The Polish Ministry of Culture on December 29announcedthat Open Group—which counts among its members Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga—will be featured in the Polish Pavilion for the duration of the Biennale, to take place April 20–November 24, 2024. The ministry said it had made the change after “analyzing the competition procedures for the exhibition design as part of the 60th International Art Exhibition in Venice in 2024 and after getting acquainted with the opinions and voices of the communities.”RelatedNAZI-LOOTED DUTCH PAINTING RETURNED TO GOUDSTIKKER HEIRPOPE.L (1955–2023) Czawartos in October had been named as the country’s representative under the administration of then prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, whose right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party was known for its harsh stance against LGBTQ rights and those of women, and for replacing international or progressive museum leaders with provincial, conservative directors. Morawiecki in December was cast out by voters in favor of Donald Tusk, of the more centrist Civic Platform party. Tusk installed a new minister of culture, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, who reviewed Czwartos’s planned project for the Polish Pavilion.

Titled “Polish Practice in Tragedy: Between Germany and Russia” and centering on atrocities committed by Russians and Germans against Poles, it had drawn backlash for its nationalist bent and for depicting Poland as a perpetual victim. Among the included works was one showing German chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin in close proximity to a flaming swastika. “[My] selection took place in accordance with the legal procedures,” Czwartos told theArt Newspaper. “The verdict of the competition jury was accepted by the minister of culture and national heritage. The contract between me and Zachęta Gallery, the institution responsible for the realization of the exhibition, has been signed.

I perceive it as censorship.” Czawartos’s pavilion was to have been organized by Warsaw’s Zachęta National Gallery of Art, which remains in the role, though now with a new director: Sienkiewicz fired Janusz Janowski, named to the role by the PiS administration, and replaced him with Justyna Markiewicz, who was previously deputy director of the institution. Open Group’s pavilion, “Repeat After Me,” will be curated by Marta Czyż. The collective will show its karaoke-themed videoRepeat After Me, which features forcibly displaced Ukrainians describing their experiences of conflict through the sounds they recall. “We believe that Open Group’s proposal formally and ideologically presents the values that we want to defend,” Joanna Warsza, a co-curator of Poland’s pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, toldThe Guardian.“Openness, tolerance, care, empathy, and opposition to armed conflicts and responds to the overarching theme of the Venice Biennale: ‘Foreigners Everywhere’!”.