Slavs and Tatars. LONG LVIVE LVIV. СЛАВА ЗА БРЕСЛАВА
Opening: 15.10.2021, 6:30 p.m.
Duration: 16.10.2021–29.01.2022
Join the event on Facebook: LINK
On the same evening, at 7:30 pm, we also invite you to the opening of Ella Littwitz’s exhibition If Everything That Exists Has Its Place at SIC! BWA Wrocław (pl. Kościuszki 9/10, Wrocław).
CONTEXT
>> Introduction: LINK
>> History of the Oriental Studies Department: LINK
>> History of the Kulczycki family collection: LINK
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The first in Wrocław, individual exhibition of one of the most recognizable artistic collectives in the world – Slavs and Tatars.
“As a child, we did not know that the east would one day move west. What a strange idea? Who would have ever though a direction could move in another direction?”
–Slavs and Tatars, “Slavs”, 032c, 2006.
Slavs and Tatars’ exhibition LONG LVIVE LVIV/СЛАВА ЗА БРЕСЛАВА revisits the intertwined histories of Lviv and Wroclaw, from the particular perspective of orientalism. Following World War II, as Lviv was incorporated into the Ukrainian Republic of the Soviet Union, the Polish population of the city was forced to relocate to Wroclaw, a German city given to Poland at the Potsdam Conference in exchange for the loss of its Eastern territories. Alongside the massive population transfers, scholars at the renowned Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv (today the Ivan Franko National University) were forced to flee and a majority took up posts at Wroclaw University. One key department, however, did not survive this deportation.
As the eastern frontier of the Second Polish Republic, Lviv had one of the leading oriental studies departments in Europe. For OP ENHEIM, Slavs and Tatars resurrect the Department of Oriental Studies in Wroclaw, as if the traditions of scholarship and inquiry about the East had survived the move westwards. Against the backdrop of a collection of Oriental rugs from the Kulczycki Family Collection, Ukrainian faculty of the Ivan Franko University will be invited to Wroclaw to conduct a series of masterclasses, workshops and courses at OP ENHEIM, ranging from Arabic and Persian language to the constitutive role of Islam in Eastern European history. Alongside a new series of social sculptures, the artists have also conceived a collection of merchandising as university paraphernalia.
More than seventy five years after the histories of Lviv and Wroclaw first became entangled, the issue of migration continues to be both consequential and misconstrued, globally and in Poland. The exhibiton invites us to reconsider how knowledge and power are impacted by national borders and notions of self, in light of continued contemporary migration from the East to Poland.
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Organizer: OP ENHEIM
Co-organizer: VOP
Sponsorship: Womak Holding SA
Partners: The Tatra Museum in Zakopane, European Commission of the European Parliament, agitPolska e.V, The City of Wrocław, Wrocław Center of Social Development, ZA*Grupa, Foundation of Polish-German Cooperation, College of Eastern Europe Jan Nowak Jeziorański, OPEN Reklama Oksana Solnik-Krzyżanowska, Raster Gallery, Keim, Kubota, Warsaw Gallery Weekend
Media patronage: Vogue Poland, NN6T, Radio Wrocław, Radio RAM
The exhibition is held under the Honorary Patronage of the Mayor of Wrocław.
Project is co-financed from the funds of the City of Wrocław (www.wroclaw.pl) and The Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation.
