Impossible Objects, 2014; installation view, Impossible Objects, 2015. Courtesy of Instytut Architektury, Krakow. Photo: Jakub Woynarowski.

The decision to exhibit the work in Krakow is motivated by the replica’s proximity to the original, which sits just two miles away. In one long afternoon stroll, it is possible to see both the 1937 original baldachin by Szyszko-Bohusz on Wawel Hill and its contemporary reproduction at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow (MOCAK). For a number of viewers in Poland, the MOCAK show is in itself an apparent duplicate; it is first and foremost a replica of the Venice Biennale exhibition, which creates an additional and welcomed dichotomy within the work.

Szyszko-Bohusz’s baldachin is concerned with representing tradition, an aspect that is stressed in Woynarowski’s diagrams. While working on the baldachin, Szyszko-Bohusz was also involved in the restoration of the Wawel Castle. The restoration project sought care for its national soothsayers by bringing the ashes of Poland’s romantic poets—Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and Cyrpian Norwid—and burying them at the Wawel Cathedral. The gesture was taken in an attempt to construct a national cultural reliquary that would unite a fractured Polish identity, which desperately needed an allegorical presence at the helm of its political office. The baldachin was a conscious part of this restoration project. It too serves as a reliquary, laying bare the romantic symbols in the crypt, which are also present in Woynarowski’s diagrams. The only words that appear on the structure are “Corpora dormiunt; vigilant animae” (The body rests; the soul is vigilant), which echoes the Polish-romantic sentiment of combining both power and spirit. Likewise, the Corinthian columns stand like a silent procession, bringing to mind Vitruvius, who in his drawings measured the columns in the proportions of the human body.

Impossible Objects, 2014; installation view, Impossible Objects, 2015. Courtesy of the Author.

The most marked feature of the baldachin, as noted by critics, is the flat roof that hovers above the six Corinthian columns like a shadow. It is a feature that Woynarowski, along with the curators—Dorota Jędruch, Dorota Leśniak-Rychlak, Marta Karpińska, and Wiśniewski of the Institute of Architecture—intended to highlight by making a slight alteration in the replica. When looked at from below, the heavy modern top (seventeen by thirteen feet) appears to be floating above the columns, as if the roof had materially reduced itself to a haunting halo. The effect is startling and shows the impossibility of unity within this single object, between the aspirations of its modern “head” and the body of columns that attempt to support it.

The replica at MOCAK is made of Styrofoam and photographic prints. Removed from its original surroundings and its function as a relic, the piece is no longer tied to the allegorical materiality of its past and instead aspires to hold a pure form as an art object. Woynarowski’s charts on the wall at MOCAK are instructional, but they are also an attempt and a struggle to place the object within and outside of its context to destabilize its position as a Polish relic and a monument. Woynarowski has a history of attempting to destabilize our idea of what is modern and contemporary. In Saturnia Regna (2014), he locates Malevich’s iconic Black Square in its premodern versions, where it takes on a different spiritual dimension. Bringing the exhibition to Krakow—to face Szyszko-Bohusz’s original baldachin—forces us to ask what the reproduction of the form retains from its original.

Jakub Woynarowski. Impossibilia, 2014. Courtesy of Instytut Architektury, Krakow. Photo: Jakub Woynarowski

The night before the opening, I overheard one of Krakow’s most prominent artists say, “It is an exhibition for the poor,” by which he meant those who didn’t have money to travel and see the piece at the Biennale. Although seemingly pessimistic, the comment was telling: It completely omitted the fact that the original structure has been at Wawel for years. The exhibition makes apparent that the language of modernity that Szyszko-Bohusz was operating in has become invisible to most. As if placing the original in front of a mirror, the replica reveals what the original cannot. It helps the ideas of the original return to Krakow in a new currency and language of the art world.

Impossible Objects is on view at Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland, through January 17, 2016.

Accordingly, there are many approaches to exploring the past in this exhibition.  Some artists take history itself as a subject, while others focus on particular events from the world-shaking to the minutely individualistic.  The overarching theme is solidly postmodernist; a conspicuous refutation of the existence of any single version of events.  In fact, History in Art reinforces the preference for subjectivity by presenting work by artists working in all media and at different stages of their careers.  In this way, the exhibition examines history from almost all angles and media, and the diversity is rewarding.

Shinji Ogawa, Then and Now, Krakow, 2010, acrylic on book

Shinji Ogawa’s practice involves a series of techniques that investigate the image by drawing, overdrawing, halving, doubling, and layering.  Along one wall are three vitrines that encase picture or travel books from various cities.  One example, Then and Now, Krakow (2010) shows two views—one antiquated, one more modern—of the city’s main square with its famous Cloth Hall.  Ogawa has drawn the architectural elements that are cropped out of the originals across the gutter of the book.  His work links the two individual pictures, extending the scene and bringing the past in touch with the present.

Krystyna Piotrowska, I Left Poland Because…, 2010, video, 31 min

Loss haunts many of the works in the exhibition.  Krystyna Piotrowska‘s I Left Poland Because… (2010) is a two-channel video projected into the cleft of two angled walls.  Very simply, the two images show a close-up shot of a person uttering sentences beginning with “I left Poland because…” On the left, the person speaks in Polish; on the right, she speaks in English.  When one side is speaking, the other is frozen.  One quote: “I left Poland because it was the only country where I couldn’t be Polish.”  The components of this installation all contribute meaningfully to the whole: the angled walls create a setting where the speaker looks at the audience, but also nearly faces her estranged self.   Additionally, the switch between Polish and English very deftly facilitates an awareness of how language creates identity. The immobility of one side while the other talks points to the barriers of language and the slippage of translation.  In the gap between languages, how much is lost?

Robert Kuśmirowski, Processing, 2011, installation

Robert Kusmirowski’s Processing (2011) is a room-sized installation wherein classical sculptures are ground to dust.  One side begins with the figures in packing cases, then on leftward to threshing and winnowing machines, to a flourmill, a drill, and a sawmill cart.  This allegorical factory reduces even the most durable members of art’s legacy to mere grist for the mill.

Boaz Arad, Marcel, Marcel, 2000, video

Videos presented on flat-screen monitors are scattered throughout the exhibition.  It seems fitting that digital video, that most plastic of media, should be used to examine and recreate history.  Boaz Arad‘s work, for example, uses the flexibility of video combined with humor to address the legacy of Hitler and the Nazis.  100 Beats (1999) lampoons Hitler as a pervert masturbating onstage by looping a short clip of der Führer moving his hand in his pocket.  Shalom Jerusalem takes short clips from various archives of Hitler’s speeches to create a public address that never happened: Hitler saying, “Shalom Jerusalem, I apologize.”   In Marcel, Marcel (2000) Hitler’s mustache is playfully re-imagined.  This strategy of using absurdity to counter fear and brutality brings welcome levity to the exhibition as a whole.  Hitler’s reign may seem both geographically far and historically distant to an American audience, but the effects of World War II are still keenly felt in modern-day Poland.  By heightening the buffoonery of a murderous little dictator, Arad swabs old wounds with new laughter.