A visit to the gallery is a bit like an appointment with the doctor. Conversation with Bartosz Przybył-Ołowski
Piotr Policht: The history of the Razem Pamoja Foundation dates back to joint initiative of high school students from Rabka-Zdrój and Mathare Valley in Nairobi in 2011. How did that happen? Bartosz Przybył-Ołowski: At the time, I taught philosophy at the Romer High School in Rabka-Zrój. One day, when I was walking to school, I bought a newspaper that included an article about the recent devastation of Jedwabne memorials. I’m interested in current events, so I read out the text during my class and I noticed that my students were hardly moved by the issue. So I thought that I could do much more than teach philosophy and write textbooks, that my political attitude could be sharper, more active, more driven by acting, sharing, and learning. Those ideas stood behind the book Towards Africa (Książka i Prasa, 2014). PP: What were the circumstances of its publication? BPO: With Jan Swianiewicz, I went to Kenya for the first time. We started working on the methodology of education in collaboration that would entail an equal, active treatment of intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical skills of students from Mathare and Rabka. We organised symmetrical philosophy workshops whose results served intellectuals working with “Le Monde Diplomatique” to write and share with us their essays in philosophy, ethnography, economics, and pedagogy, which were included in the book next to the students’ statements. The sale of Towards Africa was meant to finance the creation of a scholarship fund for students from the Kenya slum, which did happen indeed. PP: When did you come up with the idea to start Bookstore|Exhibition as part of the foundation? BPO: The book came to being as a non-profit initiative. Almost none of those involved in its publication requested any money for their work. It was amazing; we realised that we could refer to something that was pure giving, sharing your skills with no material motivations. When the book was published we thought it would be a good idea to create a place where we could share the energy that was amassed when
we worked on it. Then we came up with the idea to start Bookstore|Exhibition. The fact that it combines a bookstore and a gallery is not accidental. Towards Africa was and still remains the driving force behind our intellectual initiatives, our collaboration with publishing houses such as Le Monde, Zed Books, and Karakter. We wanted to create an intellectual layer that involved discussions, meetings, and formation of a club, a common interest circle. At that particular moment showing art was not so important. Hence the name, which is rather complicated and unfortunate, but which seemed at the time to express our idea – to think about showing certain realities visually and discuss them at the same time. Before Bookstore|Exhibition was established, several shows that led to the publication of Towards Africa took place in an amazing location, at 8 Krupnicza Street, where Marta and Piotr Błachut run their ecological shop. This was the first time I started working with Dominik Kuryłek. It was a period of experiment. PP: Describe those exhibitions you organised together with Dominik. BPO: We wanted to consider how to avoid the possibility that Towards Africa might share the fate of many other books that become published and then no one really knows what to do next. Pamoja ceased to focus entirely on education and started introducing an artistic and political-economic context, which happened thanks to Dominik Kuryłek, who was the curator of two exhibitions and over a dozen happenings in that, already non-existent place. Dominik decided to make an exhibition about artists who withdrew from culture and at the same time he investigated the movement of Kultura Zrzuty. Every week, there was an opening of a new show dedicated to artists such as Jacek Kryszkowski, Leszek Golec, Tatiana Czekalska, Ewa Zarzycka, or Magda Lazar who talked about Hermes, who withdrew from culture so much that he lived somewhere by the Vistula river near Krakow. At the time, I handed out a large portion of my collection of philosophical books and I wanted to organise the situation when the books would be exchanged for a commitment to purchase Towards Africa once it has been published, and thus subsidise our scholarship fund. Without all that happened at Galeria Smaku we would certainly never have decided to open a new space in Krakow. For the first time there was a situation when artists donated their works after the exhibition and their sale
boosted our scholarship fund and covered the costs of printing of Towards Africa. Those were the roots of our working outside the grant system and outside the process of waiting for grant money. By working together we practically generated the power to act, to make exhibitions, to publish a book. What happened afterwards came as a development of these experiences. PP: Could you describe the process of your moving from Krupnicza Street to Józefińska Street? BPO: We moved when we published the book. We decided that we had to create a place where we could discuss it and make exhibitions. Initially, the latter were meant to address the direct links between what was happening in Poland, Europe, the West, and what was happening in Kenya and the global South. The first artist to open the new space of Bookstore|Exhibition was Monika Drożyńska. Employing Kenyan aesthetics she made a “tapestry” and then she decided to sing out excerpts from the book. This work was titled The Third Way and it proved to be a liminal experience – not only for the artist, I think. Later Stuart Bailey and Francesca Bertolotti created a very British, empirical exhibition called Elementary Equations from Towards Africa books, visually converting their number into concrete actions that our foundation was involved in at the time. They provided answers to simple questions: how many copies have to be sold to fund a scholarship for a high school student from Kenya, how many to fund a scholarship for a student on primary school level, or how many to organise a camp for high school students coming from a very poor part of Kenya who are about to join one of the best high schools is Kenya. Those were attempts to think about alternative economy and working through art on the basis of unmediated emotions. PP: Maintaining your own space generates high costs. From an economic point of view, didn’t you find the decision to open this space rather risky? BPO: Very much so. In fact, one month’s rent equals one yearly scholarship. We need 900 dollars a year for one outstanding student from Mathare to attend a very good high school. This is our monthly rent for both our spaces. We had a great dilemma whether there was any point in opening our space. On the other hand, we thought we could create the place and close it if the energy generated by the sales of Towards
Africa ran out. It also turned out that this move was very effective, since we sold a lot of books thanks to this space. When we have run out of this fuel, when we saw that the costs of maintaining our space were equal or even higher than our revenue from many sources, we decided to ask for help numerous artists with whom we either worked or thought we could start working. We were successful in making this economy, which was reaching the limits of a rational operation both in Krakow as well as in Nairobi, to gain new momentum; converting monthly rents to scholarships is no longer problematic. We have organised an art auction called Explore, Act, Share at the CCA Ujazdowski Castle, while before that we organised numerous exhibitions without which the auction would not have been possible. On this occasion, together with Luxus art group, we donated to the CCA’s collection the work Voodoo Africa, a several-metre-long assemblage in the shape of the African continent, which Luxus built over several days when they worked on their exhibition at Bookstore|Exhibition. PP: The profile of the place has changed a bit over the course of the last two years. Exhibitions are no longer focused on the links between the global South and global North. The gallery part has become more important than the bookstore, where not much is happening. BPO: The bookstore has become almost dead, but the exhibition part operates successfully. An important element is our Mathare Art Gallery, a symmetrical place we established less than a year after we opened the Krakow space. Right from the beginning, the idea of the foundation has been to keep the balance between the global South and global North. At present, we are going back to the idea of symmetry between intellectual initiatives and exhibition practice. Our activities in autumn will be dedicated to exhibitions we organise together with Przemek Wielgosz, the editorin-chief of “Le Monde Diplomatique – Polish Edition” and Dominika BlachnickaCiacek, a sociologist from the Goldsmiths College, who invited artists Mikołaj Długosz and Kuba Czerwiński to collaborate with them. The exhibition and the programme of related events will address the problem of the refugee crisis in a universal context and in reference to the history of Palestine.
PP: Does this collaboration mean a more permanent definition of the profile of your exhibition practice? Until now, you have worked with a diverse group of artists. BPO: For some time now our profile has been based on making exhibitions about the most broadly understood issue of minorities. Our recent exhibition of Amanda Wieczorek is an example of working with situations from the outside of political mainstream. The same regards exhibitions that we shall be opening in the near future. Wojtek Szymański will curate a show presenting the work of Roma artists; another will be curated by Ewa Ciepielewska and it will concern the issue of the freedom of the Vistula River and its ecosystem. The exhibition will be developed around the work of artists invited this summer by Agnieszka Brzeżańska, Ewa Ciepielewska, and the Razem Pamoja Foundation to participate in an open-air art event and a cruise on Solny K 11 Galley from Gdańsk to Sandomierz. This broadens our initial idea, since we no longer focus on the relation between the global South and global North, but we pay attention to all insufficiently represented minorities: be it sexual, ethical, ecological, aesthetic… PP: Aesthetic? BPO: Yes. We have started our collaboration with Lamella – the house of queer arts. They address a much deeper problem than that of sexual minority, propose a much broader scope. They are much akin to camp: to us at Pamoja, the new aesthetics that they propose is quite fascinating. PP: You set up a balance between the two galleries, but in case of artists it is more of a migration in one direction, since the Krakow venue features a bigger number of artists from the North. Why? BPO: The double exhibitions of Joanna Piotrowska, Mathilde Rosier, and Andrzej Karoń might work was an argument that we over-represent artists from the North, yet the recent case of the residency of Iddi Bashir, his collaboration with Małgosia Markiewicz, and the presentation of her work at Flow in Berlin is a reverse situation. Recently, Mathare Art Gallery dedicated its space entirely to artists from Nairobi, especially those living in the peripheries. They were invited by our Kenyan curator, Justus Omondi. Initially, we leaned more towards the North, but now we intend to
make a shift and show more often artists from Kenya. This new situation was initiated by Iddi Bashir who worked in Krakow. PP: Does this mean that you are planning to open a residency programme here in Krakow? BPO: A residency programme for artists from the global South in Krakow is our dream. In fact, this idea first emerged when we started working on an exhibition that opens soon, curated by Ania Batko and Kamil Kuitkowski. The show is a reaction to the refugee crisis. Those two young curators were in the process of organising a show for the Krakers Gallery Weekend when they decided to stop this work because they dreamed of starting a residency for artists from the war zone. The beginning of this chapter was shown as part of Krakers. A large number of great artists are involved in this initiative, such as Aneta Grzeszykowska, Rafał Bujnowski, Przemek Branas, Małgorzata Szymankiewicz, and Bogusław Bachorczyk, whose works will be shown in Palestine and later in Krakow. We believe that this initiative will result is us creating a residency programme for artists from the war zone. A lot is being said in Poland on how much we can do for the refugees, but for many reasons not much is being done. The Foundation wishes also to encourage collaboration between artists and communities in Poland and those who will be staying on residencies in Krakow. Perhaps we can make this happen through Ania and Kamil’s initiatives. PP: You have mentioned earlier Justus Omondi, who runs the gallery in Mathare. We know people who work at Pamoja in Poland. But who is Justus and how did you meet him? BPO: Justus Omondi is a thirty-something-old citizen of Mathare Valley whom we met first four years ago when someone recommended him as a very good painter, but I mean a wall painter. Because Justus turned out to be a man of many talents, we started working with him on many projects involving the exchange of murals between Polish and Kenyan schools. When we opened the Mathare Art Gallery we thought that he was the best person to run this project, since he was already familiar with how Pamoja operated. Kamil Kuitkowski, who is Justus’s equivalent here in Krakow, the curator of Bookstore|Exhibition, spent two months in Nairobi. The exchange of
experiences between those two had a very positive and powerful impact on each of them. PP: In a text for one of the exhibitions he realised in Nairobi Kamil Kuitkowski wrote about confronting the expectations and images that the citizens of Mathare had about your gallery, about how many of them asked if this was a photography studio. How to deal with working there and avoid creating a situation of a peripheral cultural centre that attracts only the most immediate neighbours or, on the other hand, creating a neocolonial mentoring situation like “we come here to show you what contemporary art is really about”? BPO: I think that the situation in Mathare is very unique. It is a place that could not exist without the trust of the local community of this part of Mathare. It is already a great success that we managed to establish Mathare Art Gallery in that place. From that moment on we have witnessed an amazing process. Indeed, in the beginning it was not clear what was really going on there – whether that was yet another NGO that would soon move out, a photography studio, or something else entirely. Our consistency in organising exhibitions of both European artists as well as those from Kenya, in our education projects, renovation of Macco School, and the scholarship programme – all this meant that local citizens really made an effort to understand what was going on. And now they understand that it is a place that shows art, but also one where you can bring your art pieces. When I’m there, everyday I talk to several artists and craftsmen who bring their work to the gallery to exhibit them. They don’t really mean to sell them, but to put them on display or ask for advice, very much like coming to the doctor. PP: What kind of advice? BPO: If they are craftsmen who don’t make simple things for tourists, but unique objects, they ask whether this is something they could make a living from. They hope that thanks to Mathare Art Gallery they will be able to show their work to a wider audience, to move outside their studio. This is why we think that at this particular moment is its important to start nearby something like a training centre where they could work on unique objects with craftsmen from the global North. Perhaps they could develop objects that would manifest combined skills of artists from the North
and South. This way we could give work to people who are currently unemployed and live on the verge of complete destitution. Alicja Wysocka made such an experiment when she started making shoes with local shoemakers, with considerable success. When they make art rather than crafts they usually dream of exhibiting their work at Mathare Art Gallery. I think this is where their ambitions end. PP: Mathare gallery is very much focused on working with the local community, inhabitants of a slum which is quite visibly separated from the rest of the city by infrastructure and economic gap. Does it in any way collaborate with the local art community, the gallery scene of Nairobi? BPO: Not initially, since it wasn’t our goal to collaborate with professional artists; there are many of them in Nairobi, they are concentrated around several places, as well as they travel to Europe and the US. Our goal was to be more interested in the minorities, artists and craftsmen who are marginalised and left without the possibility of working within the art community of Nairobi. It was never our ambition to show artists from the city centre. We have exhibited either European artists or those living in Mathare and its outskirts. This situation will probably change when Mathare will be visited by six graffiti artists who are very famous across Africa, who were invited to paint a mural on the school that the Razem Pamoja Foundation is now renovating. This will be the first case when mainstream artists will be collaborating with the Foundation and the Mathare Art Gallery. PP: Could you tell us something more about the work of artists who collaborated with Pamoja in Nairobi and later in Krakow? I understand that this is your intentional strategy to show works made in the studio first in one and then the other gallery? BPO: It so happened that I had a pleasure to work with Mathilde Rosier, Joanna Piotrowska, and at present with Bartek Materka. It is very unique when an artist can work on the same project in two locations, with two communities. They are never the same exhibitions, they are deeply transformed. My method of working in such situations is simply to rely on empirical experience, to investigate things that are currently happening. Mathilde Rosier, for instance, had an idea to make a film in Mathare that could develop a therapeutic situation in Krakow. She believed that the energy she could find in Mathare and translate into an art form could help people in
Krakow. Joanna Piotrowska, on the other hand, sought to analyse relations between a white woman and black men in a very literal sense, since she in fact did play both roles – the artist and the subject of her action. PP: Piotrowska not only played the role of a white sex tourist in this story, but I think that she also talked about her own situation of a white, economically privileged artist who comes there and can freely choose images that she later shows to the European audience. Is this situation problematic for artists? I feel it was problematic for Piotrowska. BPO: Piotrowska was not able to show her project in Nairobi because it is not allowed to show any project that involves nudity. Our plan to show her work in Nairobi and in Uganda, where we were approached by one of its galleries, didn’t work out because the law doesn’t allow it. Rosier, however, managed to open two shows. It is important to realise that we don't just invite artists for residencies to collect some objects in Africa and show them in Europe only. Rosier brought her paintings and she organised a gigantic performance that brought together several thousand people from the Mathare Valley. She worked with the local community of tailors and dancers for three weeks. Bartek Materka is doing the same thing at the moment; he didn’t go there empty-handed to search for some treasures, but brought his paintings; he works with sculptors and painters, which is an element that Pamoja introduces and offers to Mathare’s community. Of course, experiences collected by artists on location result in their exhibitions organised in Krakow, but the point is to activate both places. PP: At present, you are planning to open a new gallery in Jakarta. I am wondering why did you pick Indonesia as a location for another permanent space. Nairobi seems obvious, as this is where your Foundation’s activities have been developing from the very start. But what about Indonesia? BPO: This year in spring Krzysztof Łukomski and Marianna Dobkowska invited our Foundation to participate in their exhibition Social Design for Social Living. We didn’t want to show any projects from the past, but work instead in our preferred format, that is, create new situations. From the very beginning Pamoja has collaborated with two remarkable artists who know Indonesia very well, namely Justyna Górowska and Adam Gruba, whom we invited to develop a project on
location. This project was called Hati Hati Hat. Justyna and Adam asked their friends to modify, disenchant or deconstruct the colonial hat. Next, we wanted to investigate whether we could use the power of capitalism and the market to create a gallery that would invite artists from Europe who could collaborate with Indonesian artists and then invite them to Poland. The entire operation ended with success, as we were able to open a gallery in Jakarta. Justyna Gรณrowska will stay there for a six-month scholarship, so we try to make the best of given circumstances and at present we have enough means to keep the gallery going for at least the period when Justyna and Adam are based in Indonesia.