BRUSSELS — It’s 2012. In Cairo, Egyptians are gathering once again in Tahrir Square, demanding the handover of power from the military junta that has ruled the country since the overthrow of authoritarian President Hosni Mubarak.
The government’s response is brutal. There are deaths and many wounded, those arrested are beaten and tortured. Artist Jasmina Metwaly and other members of the Mosireen Collective pull on several layers of clothing. They walk in a group. They are looking for women.
In Tahrir Square, women are doubly threatened, not only with military gas and batons but also with sexual violence. Men surround them, undress them and harass them. Activists have no doubt that at least some of them are doing this on behalf of the military dictatorship. This is the best way to discourage Egyptian women from protesting and to ruin the image of the demonstrators.
Activists from the OpAntiSH (Operation Anti Sexual Harassment) group find terrified, undressed women and create a protective cordon around them. Metwaly and her colleagues take off their clothes and give them to them. Some of the women pulled out of the crowd later return to the square as volunteers, helping the others.
“I’ve only been there a few times,” she said. “It’s a very difficult experience. You see terrified, traumatized people. You feel people from outside pushing against the cordon, screaming, sometimes someone shooting in the air.”
Metwaly’s works — patchwork clothes with camouflage patterns, which she designs with costume designer Marta Szypulska, and a video of a demonstration recorded by the Mosireen Collective — are part of the Brussels exhibition “Familiar Strangers. Eastern Europeans from a Polish Perspective.”
This exhibition is presented in an unconventional way: Curator Joanna Warsza shows Eastern Europe through the eyes of a minority, in contrast to the belief in its homogeneity, which functions both in the West and among Poles themselves.
Metwaly has Polish-Egyptian roots, and has lived in Szczecin, Cairo and Berlin. But her works can also be treated as a metaphor for the story behind the exhibition.
Poland in the periphery
While the exhibition was being assembled, European leaders were rapidly developing a common defense strategy. The thesis about the end of the old global order went from shocking to banal in a matter of weeks.
“We see more and more clearly that the future of Europe is being decided in Poland,” said Zoë Gray, head of the exhibition department at the Bozar art center, which is presenting the exhibition in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. “In the uncertainty in which we find ourselves, it gives hope that we will find new ways of looking at ourselves and those around us.”
For this to happen, Poles had to come a long way. Historical and geopolitical divisions have pushed us to the periphery for years. “Growing up in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, I had the feeling that the real Europe was somewhere else. We were just its cheaper version,” Warsza said.
Maybe that is why the patron of the exhibition — the author of the only non-contemporary work — is Natalia LL. Her famous “Consumer Art” is still delightfully ambiguous: The West sees in it only an erotic provocation or an ironic commentary on the objectification of women; The East knows that the object of desire can be not only the model visible in the video but also the banana she is devouring.
Growing up in Poland a decade later, I know that this feeling did not disappear with the fall of the Iron Curtain or with our country’s accession to the European Union. We are gradually getting rid of our complexes toward the West. But should we also stop noticing our differences?
“Even if our goal were to erase the division between Eastern and Western Europe, we must first know that it existed,” Warsza said. “This rift goes back much further than the Cold War. The Elbe River, along which the Iron Curtain ran, is also another border: on one side there was slavery, on the other serfdom.”
The title of the exhibition, “Familiar Strangers” refers to a book published in 2017 by the Jamaican-born British sociologist Stuart Hall, who saw the potential for building a diverse but equal society in culture.
A larger community
The term itself is much older, however. In 1972, it was used by the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram to describe the relationship between city dwellers who see each other regularly, for example, at a bus stop. Even if they never talk to each other, they do not perceive each other as complete strangers. Recognizing strangers is important: it makes them feel like part of a larger community.
Most people associate Milgram’s name with another study: his obedience experiment inspired by Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann. In 1963, the Milgram demonstrated that ordinary people are capable of inflicting pain and suffering on innocent strangers if they are ordered to do so by an authority figure who invokes principles and convinces them that they are doing so for the common good.
If these two studies are transformed into a story about contemporary society, one can follow both at the exhibition in Brussels. The one that is consciously posed by the utopian postulate of coexistence on equal terms. And the one that reminds us that empathy ends with the abstract line of division between our own and the alien.
Sometimes these stories meet in one work.
This is the case with Mikołaj Sobczak’s pictorial palimpsests (manuscript pages from which the text has been scraped or washed off for reuse). In an unconventional way, they combine iconography borrowed from academic painting, portraits of historical figures, symbolic motifs and contemporary tropes. Sobczak is fascinated by history, although he is critical of historical politics.
“I understand that Polish heritage is also my heritage, even if I deeply disagree with it,” he said. His paintings, in which drag queens and “cursed soldiers” become symbols of the independence uprising, pierce the bloated and smooth national iconography like weeds growing between concrete slabs.
Zuzanna Hertzberg’s works commemorate Jewish female revolutionaries, anarchists and anti-fascists from the early 20th century. The artist places their portraits on fabric, combining them with illustrations from atlases of medicinal plants, trimming them with fringes and piping. The result is colorful banners, similar to those carried in church processions or state parades. This form is contrasted with a background made of grey, industrial non-woven fabric, which Poles associate with a floor cloth. The series is titled: “Jewish rags.”
Hertzberg does not lock her banners in the safe space of the gallery, but takes them out into the streets. She emphasizes that her work is both artistic and activist. And that equal rights mean breaking the “sub-tenant contract,” an unwritten rule according to which minorities have a conditional place in society and can lose it at any time if they do not submit to the majority: rebel, demand change, break the rules. Or simply offend too much.
“Foreigners” in Poland
How strongly this contract still binds minorities was evident in Ngo Van Tuong’s speech at the opening. The activist, translator, entrepreneur and informal spokesman for the Warsaw diaspora, who comes from Vietnam, has lived in Poland since 1983, and has had Polish citizenship since 2007.
In the media and on social media platforms, she raises issues concerning the Polish Vietnamese, and also brilliantly talks about her everyday life.
At the exhibition, she and Warsza showed the documentation of their joint project “Journey to Asia” (realized with Anna Gajewska). Yet when walking through the exhibition, Ngo Van Tuonga focused on emphasizing how exemplary the Vietnamese diaspora is integrating, how hard they work, how they develop businesses that employ Poles, Ukrainians and Africans.
How little it takes to become a minority is reminded of in a fragment of a book by journalist Oliwia Bosomtwe, the daughter of a Polish mother and a Ghanaian father. Bosomtwe is Polish, she was raised in Nowy Targ in southern Poland. And yet she is still treated like a visitor. Even seemingly innocent remarks, such as complimenting her Polish, automatically put her in the category of “foreigner.” In fact, Bosomtwe speaks Polish better than most of her fellow citizens; she is a journalist and was the editor of the Noizz magazine for three years.
The place of artists from Belarus and Ukraine shown in the exhibition is interesting in this context. In the Polish art world, the presence of artists from beyond our eastern border is obvious today. Unlike in society, in which xenophobic moods have been gradually growing after the first, empathetic reflex in 2022. Especially in relation to Ukrainians, whom Polish society is increasingly eager to reprimand when they take up space and expect constant expressions of gratitude.
Shouting and poking eyes
The exhibition does not address this topic — and there is nothing surprising about that. Its narrative is based on the voices of minorities and diasporas living in Poland, not necessarily focusing on private experiences or relations with Polish society. Maybe because compared to other issues, they are simply secondary.
This is clearly brought up in the work of the Ukrainian collective Open Group. In Brussels, you can see a video from the series “Repeat after me,” presented last year in the Polish pavilion at the Venice Biennale and then at Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. In Venice, it delighted critics, and no wonder: It is a great work. The artists from Open Group have found a way to translate war trauma into the language of art without falling into patterns, pathos or literalism.
It is also worth viewing this work in the context of the new “sub-tenant contract” — according to which Ukrainians have their place in Polish society as victims of war, who can best identify themselves with serious trauma, but arouse reluctance when they do not fit the idea of victims.
Jana Shostak, a Belarusian-Polish artist, also does not fit the idea of a victim. Shostak takes part in demonstrations, protests and public appearances. But instead of speaking, she screams. “It is an act of hopelessness, helplessness. For the first time I screamed because I did not know how else to comment on what was happening” she said.
Her “minute of screaming” — an aggressive play on the minute of silence — was first heard in front of the European Commission’s office in Warsaw, where Shostak demanded the imposition of sanctions on Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who brutally suppressed pro-democracy protests a year earlier. Although the EU expressed outrage, European companies continued to trade with the Belarusian regime.
In June 2021, it was also heard for the first time in Brussels. At that time, the actor Bartosz Bielenia shouted on Shostak’s behalf in the European Parliament, after receiving the European Audience Award for the Oscar-nominated film Corpus Christi.
Over the years, the artist has shouted for political prisoners in Belarus, victims of Russian aggression from Ukraine and Polish women striking against the draconian anti-abortion law. “Perhaps in the future there will be a minute of shouting for America,” she said at the opening.
Shostak does not let herself be pushed into a corner, she does not bite her tongue, she pokes eyes. Her work is moving but also irritating. The artist was insulted and ridiculed, not only by anonymous users of social media platforms. When she shouted at the opening in Brussels, it was clear how much it cost her, even though she had performed her performance many times.
Despite differences
In her recently published essay “Insignificant People,” literary scholar Agnieszka Dauksza writes that, paradoxically, Shostak’s strength lies precisely in her exposure, in the public act of helplessness and discomfort with which she infects observers. Dauksza shows that admitting helplessness and defeat can be a relief. It can bring catharsis that will allow for the building of new communities based on solidarity and care.
Assuming — very optimistically — that art can teach contemporary Europe anything, it can teach us precisely this: to not give up our voice despite a sense of helplessness; to look for connections; to recognize each other despite differences. To build a society that will act like the collective from Tahrir Square; in chaos and anxiety, to build a protective cordon around the weakest, to support them in demanding their rights. To protect them, even if we ourselves are afraid.
It is hard to find a more important task these days.
The exhibition “Familiar Strangers. The Eastern Europeans from a Polish Perspective” can be viewed at the Bozar arts center in Brussels until June 25, 2025.
