Project co-organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polish Year in Israel 2008-2009, and financed from the means of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland.
Marxism, Nihilism, Communism, Socialism and Nazism are all ideologies shaped in modern times, functioning as secular counterparts to religious perceptions. In the core of these ideologies is the secular-messianic desire of modern humans who pretend to have shaped this world and the next with their own hands, within this world.1 Modern revolutionary ideologies, Zionism among them, translated old religious longings into secular and political terms; religion was secularized, and turned into History - heavenly kingship became human kingship. However, authors such as Agata Bielik-Robson argue that hopes attached to the visions of the Messiah are disconnected from the utopian model of order; they stay on the side of an archaic, subversive position of mining the prevailing social order.
The intention of this project is the investigation of the paths in which national and other communal narratives of today remain affected by philosophical, literary and ideological Messianism. To “renew the meaning,” using the words of Maria Janion, of this historically and philosophically loaded term and cultural phenomenon of seeing oneself as “chosen” to fulfil a particular mission, comes either from the supreme order, an ideological belief or just a common sense of responsibility. What interests us is how contemporary visual art carries out and reflects upon the visions of people, nation and country as the trustees of a particular mission of liberation, salvation and self-empowerment, and to see the cultural plots interwoven in the particular vision of individual, the hero, the martyr, the prophet and finally, politician, artist and intellectual. The artists who were invited to take part in this project were asked to provide new or existing works that responded to the notion of Messianism - religious messianism, secular messianism, false messianism and national messianism. The artists were encouraged to address the way Messianism, through its various manifestations – and not solely within its Judeo-Christian context – is expressed today in politics, society and culture.
The exhibition will open in Holon and then move to Gdansk. It is dynamically structured so that some of the works will undergo change or will be replaced in the course of its duration. Within the time frame of the exhibition, experts will be invited to talk about Messianism in both Israeli and Polish narratives. After the exhibition in Gdansk, an anthology summarizing this chapter dedicated to Messianism will be published in Polish, Hebrew and English. The works presented in this exhibition examine the different expressions of “contemporary” Messianism, marked by its dynamism and its constant transformation. Thus, the politicisation of theology, a hallmark of Modernism, is replaced with a process of theologising the political, and this process is expressed in the politics of religion and fundamentalism.
Galit Eilat & Aneta Szyłak
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
