Category: Poland

What is the continuing relevance and longevity of publicly sited monuments and how are their future lives viewed? A stimulating question Maria, and perhaps as you suggest “only the external interventions or actions of vandalism can animate the forgotten meanings”. Every city, town and village in Britain has at least one monument, not all figurative. There are countless statues of people, predominantly men, who’ve made an impact at some moment of time on their community or country. How do we view our monuments in Britain? They can be missed if they disappear, sometimes stolen for profit, or re-located often inappropriately. Occasionally one is vandalised as a direct political or social …

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WRO Art Center Wroclaw 21 May 2014 There seems to be so much to Wroclaw that is no longer here – histories and people that have passed and gone. It’s survived a millennium of changing rulers who have swept across this part of central Europe since the end of the old Polish Piast kingdom – Czech Bohemians, Austrian Hapsburgs, Prussians, Russians – Napoleon came through its gates – then the grotesque Nazi occupation followed by communist suppression. The evidence of such enormous changes is still there, but harder to find. Before the Second World War, Breslau was Germany’s third largest city. As Poles from the east repopulated the evacuated city …

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Maria Gonchar asks Dear Ben and Bruce, I formulated my screening questions at WRO ART Center in written form. So… Mussolini-Obelisk is still situated in the center of Foro Italico / Foro Mussolini in Rome and even was restored recently. Engelbert Dollfuss, one of the leaders of Austrofascism, has a very groomed grave in the Hietzing cemetery in Vienna. During the Ukrainian independence I have witnessed the process of restoration of monuments which was destroyed or was victims of October revolution’s iconoclasm, as for example “Catherine the Great and her companions – De Ribas, De Volan, Potemkin, Zubov” monument in Odessa, and these companions are an example of monstrous embezzlement …

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