Performance art as a genre has been present in Polish art since the very beginning of its existence. Although first experiments took place in the 1950s, it was in the 1960s when “happenings”, “actions” and “live actions” became part of the repertoire of artistic practice in Poland. The term itself was introduced to local milieus after the 1978 international I AM festival in Warsaw.
The mission of Polish Performance Archive is “gathering, archiving, studying and providing online access to materials on the history of performance art in Poland” since its early beginnings until today.
The archive is managed by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MoMA). Its collection partially overlaps with the collection of Artists’ Archives and the Filmoteka (Film library) of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, which pre-date the Archive. In 2015 the archive dedicated to performance art was established as a separate project, and since then is being developed as such.
All the archives are successively published via an attractive web portal of the museum, available in Polish and English. The items include photographic and video documentations along with commentaries by art historians and curators. The collection is used for temporary exhibitions at MoMA and made available to other art institutions. The archives will also serve to create the final permanent exhibition of MoMA, which is still in the preparation stage (although Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw was established in 2005, and has always had a very rich exhibition programme, as of 2017 it still did not own a permanent location).
Robert Jarosz, the director of the MoMA archives stresses the particular importance of the web portal in the activities of the museum: “I approach every archive shared on-line as a sui generis exhibition, which, unlike temporary ones, does not disappear.”
Launching the on-line Polish Performance Archive in 2016 was marked by a six-week-long series of meetings with Polish performance artists, and lectures on the history of performance art. The programme highlighted the presence of female artists who strongly contributed to the development of this genre.
Robert Jarosz and Łukasz Ronduda designed the concept for a “representative selection of Polish performance works starting from the second half of 1960s until today”. Jarosz describes the work on the archive in the following words:
“This is alive, this is important. First and foremost, this has never been elaborated on, and never in such scale, and never made available. One would say «Polish performance». But no-one could actually tell what this Polish performance was. (...) Polish Performance Archive is not a ghetto, where you would have a strict definition, saying «this is a performance and that in not a performance». It does not, at any point, introduce a relation of power. There is not instrumental attitude.”
“We look at the sources. We look at the ways of reaching the goal. What could have been considered a performance in 1960s and what couldn’t. We present artists who were previously not associated with this field of performance.”
"This broad approach to the selection of artists and this inclusive mind-set, was strongly rejected by Zbigniew Warpechowski, who was our first guest during the series of meetings dedicated to Polish performance. He did not refrain from expressing his indignation beautifully, while speaking to the full audience at Museum’s hall at Pańska street. It gave me a huge satisfaction, as I have reached my goal flawlessly. That is, I wanted to transgress this fixed, customary concept. To describe this field in a way it has not been described before.”
Polish artists and milieus engaged in performance art were in many ways critical of the authorities of Polish People's Republic. Especially after the martial law, i.e. after 1981, they became involved in the so-called “second circuit” of publications and exhibitions, which was independent from state institutions and functioned without public support. Part of the exhibitions and events at that time was intended and interpreted as outright political manifestations and acts of dissent.
First and foremost, the actions of the artists themselves were heavily loaded with critical and subversive content. It was often aimed at the authoritarian practices of “people’s” government and its apparatus, as well as the traditional, patriarchal, or hierarchical aspects of Polish culture defended jointly by the authorities and the Catholic Church — in spite of the conflict between these two institutions over other spheres of life. Especially critical was the feminist movement within the Polish performance art.
As Jarosz points out: “Everything the artists did in Polish People's Republic, most certainly represented the culture of dissent. A successful one in terms of the works it produced.”
These subversive aspects of performance art later formed a significant contribution to the Polish interdisciplinary “critical art” of the 1990s. This became particularly apparent soon after the transformation of 1989 with the prominent works of the new generation of artists addressing the notions of dispersed authority, gender, illness, suffering, remembrance of Shoah, or attitude towards animals.
The processes of building the archive are similar for all three Polish Performance Archive, the Artists’ Archives, and the Filmoteka of MoMA archive. The recordings and documentations are either deposited or donated to the Museum by collection owners, artists or their heirs, usually free of charge. Sometimes they reach out themselves, on other occasions it is the Museum that initiates the contact.
Next step involves a selection process, cataloguing, digitisation, and technical and conceptual description. After that, the works are published at the website. These tasks are carried out by a small team of 2-3 persons with the support of a rotating staff composed of volunteers and interns. Since the museum is facing financial difficulties, which translate to issues with full-time employment of workers and the digitalisation equipment, the “processes of publication is delayed”.
Source:
https://artmuseum.pl/en/performans/archiwum/o-archiwum
