The work “Shame” by the Polish artist Anna Niesterowicz investigates the prejudice and fear ingrained into the Polish language, used from the beginning of Modernism to describe Poland as besieged by a sea of strangers. Anna Niesterowicz
presents an installation of 1930s printed propaganda and a video work which quotes today’s internet forums. The juxtaposition created by Niesterowicz between contemporary internet materials and historic artefacts exposes the language at its point of death, as influenced by xenophobia, prejudice and inhibitions, forever repeating themselves in a similar manner, reconstructing the past. 1930s was the period of streghtening of nationalist narrative in the country, under the influnence of regaining the state, importance of nation-controled economy, materializations of modern urban fantasies and the fear of boiling political events in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany flanking the country. The printed matter collected by Niesterowicz are documents of these times with the interwoven xenophilia that resulted with not only distributions of these type of prints but also to so called bench gettoes introduced by All-Polish Youth, a nationalist youth organization established in 1922 (from inspiration of Roman Dmowski) reestablished in 1989 (by Roman Giertych). In result of the reoccurence of the organization in the public sphere, hate speech reentered temporarily The polish political scene. The work of Niesterowicz links these distant in time events and points toward similarity of rhethorics.
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
