"There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine"
2019
Video installation:
2-channel video projection, time-lapse
Straw stacks
The work comprises two video projections, showing the sunrise and sunset on the eastern and western banks of the Vistula River in Warsaw, facing each other. Between them stands a spatial installation made of haystacks. The piece introduces postcolonial theory into the Polish context, building on the figure of Joseph Conrad.
Poland is a nation suspended on the peripheries of both the West and the East. It is divided in two by the Vistula River, which once carried enormous quantities of grain—a symbol of the forced labour that sustained the opulent lifestyle of the Polish nobility. That social disparity was particularly visible in the “Kresy” territories, a former Polish colony that still resonates sentimentally in the Polish imagination.
The title is a quote from Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad, born in the "Kresy" borderlands, would later describe the atrocities of colonial practices in the Congo in his famous novella—still often read in schools as an anti-colonial manifesto. In reality, Conrad never really objected to colonialism itself, nor did he question the legitimacy of political and cultural domination by white men. Perhaps he turned a blind eye to the dehumanisation of the Congolese because he himself was raised in a place where such dehumanisation was commonplace.
Relations in the "Kresy" were strictly colonial. The conditions of Ruthenian serfs differed little from those of enslaved people in the Congo. The grain produced by the starving subjects of the Polish gentry was floated down the Vistula—just as ivory was floated down the Congo River—to be sold to the West in Gdańsk.
The West and the East—the Occident and the Orient—are opposing categories that divide the world into Europe and non-Europe, civilisation and barbarity, colonisers and colonised. The figure of Conrad, an English author born in the Polish peripheries, becomes a pretext to reflect on this dichotomy that continues to permeate the Polish worldview. The Vistula, like the Congo River, becomes the axis of a problematic national narrative.
Based on my academic research:
"'Kresy' as the Heart of Darkness: Reading Polish and Belgian Colonialisms" New Perspectives,
Volume 30 Issue 4, December (link)
