The first chapter of the Polish Trilogy, Mary Koszmary, (’nightmare’ in Polish), deals with the nightmare of the Jews and /or the Poles. The work aims at both Polish and Israeli cultures like a two-edged sword. It features the young Polish politician and left-wing publicist, sociologist and literary critic, Sławomir Sierakowski, who was invited by Bartana to participate in the work. He is filmed making a speech he wrote calling 3,000,000 Jews to return to Poland. The speech is given in the ruins of the Stadion Dziesięciolecia (Decade Stadium) that was built to celebrate the first decade of Communist rule and the end of World War II. The young politician invites 3,000,000 Jews to come back to Poland emphasizing that they are part of the Polish culture that cannot exist by itself any more. The invitation in the work, the return of Jews to Europe, is provocative for both Polish and Israeli audiences. It challenges post-war Polish society change as it offers it a chance to become again a heterogeneous society that has to maintain multiculturalism and tolerance as a daily practice, not just as a theoretical educational process.
Catalogue no. 959 (Polish with Hebrew subtitles) File: Bartana, Yael
Catalogue no. 960 (Polish with English subtitles) File: Bartana, Yael
From Chosen curotorial text:
In her work Mary Koszmary, Yael Bartana is joined by Slawomir Sierakowski, the intellectual leader of the new left in Poland, who co-wrote a text together with another leftist activist, Kinga Dunin, at Bartana’s request. In the text he is described reciting before an empty stadium, inviting 3,300,000 Jews to come back to Poland. The fluent speech invokes the dead, as it is not clear who should come back, the dead or their desendants. The text itself is rife with antisemitic, Communist and Catholic tokens pointing to a common bleak root. Yet this work suggests a kind of redemption in the way we, in the present, can relate to the past. One interpretation of the ressurection claims that it already happened in 1948, the year in which the establishment of the State of Israel was declared. After the Holocaust, the surviving Jews from the death camps and the crematoriums, many of them barely more than “dry bones”, having lost all their possessions, families and hope, were the people that arrived in the land of Israel, managed to rehabilitate themselves, and helped in the foundation of the Israeli State after two thousand years in the Diaspora.
According to Maimonides, ressurection is the last of the thirteen principles of faith, a doctrine every believing Jew is commited to.
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