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Aneta Grzeszykowska, Untitled Film Still #5
Zacheta (pl. Małachowskiego 3, zacheta.art.pl), which means “encouragement” in English, is Poland’s national gallery of art and dates back to 1860. The eclectic building is one of the few in Warsaw to have survived the Second World War. Aside from displaying superb exhibitions, the building has also been associated with a number of scandalous events. It was here during the opening of an exhibition in 1922 that Poland’s first president Gabriel Narutowicz was assassinated, while in the year 2000 famous Polish actor Daniel Olbrychski suddenly pulled out a sword and slashed at a number of artworks on the walls, on the grounds that these offended him.
FOT. WOJCIECH KRYŃSKI/MUZEUM HISTORII ŻYDÓW POLSKICH
This month’s upcoming exhibition Cannibalism? On Appropriation in Art (March 7- May 24) promises to be quite intriguing. It deals with a practice that lately has been widespread in art circles – the copying, transformation and reference to oeuvres by other artists in one’s own artworks.
The most prominent new arrival on Warsaw’s cultural scene is Polin, otherwise known as the Museum of the History of Polish Jews (ul. Anielewicza 6; polin.pl), which has proven to be very popular with visitors. During the first two days alone that followed the opening of the museum’s core exposition to the public last October, 15,000 people passed through the building’s doors.
Although part of the museum is inevitably devoted to the tragic events of the Holocaust, the museum does not focus exclusively on the horrors inflicted by the Nazis. Polin depicts the sometimes tumultuous but simultaneously mutually enriching coexistence of Jews and Poles over the course of a millennium. The museum stands in the heart of what was once a thriving Jewish neighbourhood of Warsaw, and which the Nazis turned into a ghetto during the Second World War. Built with a grey façade that reflects the nearby Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, the museum building is an architectural destination in itself.
Warsaw’s latest boutique hotel is also housed in building that has experienced the vagaries of the city’s turbulent history. Built in a secessionist style in 1892, the edifice served as the Soviet Union’s first embassy in Poland (as attested to by a hammer and sickle over the doorway) and as an administrative centre during the Nazi German occupation. It then experienced several metamorphoses before finally being transformed into a hotel. The interior of H 15 (ul. Poznańska 15; h15boutiqueapartments.com) is an elegant ode to black-and-white, with colourful adornments of graphic art in pop art style by Polish artist Rita Zimmerman.
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