Katarzyna Jezowska | The University of New South Wales (original) (raw)
Journal articles by Katarzyna Jezowska
Contemporary European History, 2022
This article examines the Polish exhibit at the International Labour Exhibition in Turin, 1961, w... more This article examines the Polish exhibit at the International Labour Exhibition in Turin, 1961, which presented Poland as a socialist welfare state. By locating the display within the broader historical context of Cold War competitiveness, the article intends to make two points. Firstly, using written and visual sources, this article explores how the humanistic dimension of the socialist welfare project, which remained largely unmatched by the capitalist West, was visualised and rationalised. Effectively, it proposes reading of social benefits and state subsidised services as a novel subject of cultural diplomacy. Secondly, by indicating the role of designers as significant stakeholders who actively shaped the country's self-imagining abroad, this article advances the scholarship about design diplomacy. It evidences that modern design allowed the exhibition makers to convey both symbolic and material aspects of the welfare state, which had at stake the battle for hearts and minds.
In the late 1980s Andrzej Turowski, a prominent Polish art historian coined the term ideoza. He u... more In the late 1980s Andrzej Turowski, a prominent Polish art historian coined the term ideoza. He used it to describe an obsessive situation in which every decision, both personal and institutional, had been conditioned and impelled by a currently dominated ideology. Although Turowski used this portmanteau primarily in the relation to culture, in the later years many researchers claimed that every sphere of peoples’ activity under socialist regime was equally oppressed by the Party-state.
In this paper I examine the 1st Exhibition of Polish Light Industry held in Moscow in 1949. Organised in the very year of the proclamation of Socialist Realism in arts and architecture, the exhibition aimed to redefine Polish national style in the new circumstances. As unpublished archival documents reveal, the bureaucrats, tradesmen and architects involved in the preparation of the event tried to balance the need to acknowledge the ideology and employing the pragmatism of a trade exhibition. In order to understand this challenge, this paper looks up closely at the process of creating the exhibition – forming its rationale, narrative and visual side – and confronts it with (scarce) material illustrating the final outcome presented to the public.
Articles in edited volumes by Katarzyna Jezowska
Post-1945 Poland ‒ Modernities, Transformations and Evolving Identities. Working papers, 2016
Analysing the post-war situation in Polish art in the late 1980s Andrzej Turowski coined the term... more Analysing the post-war situation in Polish art in the late 1980s Andrzej Turowski coined the term ideoza. This linguistic blend of words ideology and gnosis was used to describe an obsessive situation in which every decision both personal and institutional is conditioned and impelled by a currently dominated ideology. ‘Ideoza is an ideologically suffused space of beliefs and systems, which restricts the free manifestation of thoughts by preordained and omnipresent perspective,’ Turowski explained in his text. This title condition originally referred to culture, but but in the light of research into socialist Poland that emerged over the last three decades, the term could be easily applied to other spheres of peoples’ activity in a country oppressed by the Party-state. Not undermining the impact of the ideology on life in People’s Poland, could one think of a sphere excluded from that hegemony or of an alternative force that could influence to a comparable extent official actions of the Party-state? In this paper I would like to present a struggle against this ideology centred on the example of the 1st Exhibition of Polish Light Industry in Moscow in 1949. Similar to other international exhibitions and trade fairs organised during the Cold War, the Moscow exhibition became not only a site of convergence, allowing ideas originating from different countries to meet, but also an event where diverse national agendas clashed. Using unpublished archival materials related to the exhibition in Moscow, this paper identifies the issues that ideology was valued against and circumstances in which that took place. In order to address that, it examines the process of creating the exhibition – forming its rationale, narrative and visual side – as well as the final outcome of these efforts presented to the public.
This is the original version of an article presenting history of design in Poland in the 19th and... more This is the original version of an article presenting history of design in Poland in the 19th and 20th century that appeared in "The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design" (2015). During the editing process some significant errors have been introduced to the text by the publisher. The amended text will be published in the 2nd edition of the Encyclopedia and its online version, which will be available in 2017.
Book Reviews by Katarzyna Jezowska
Journal of Design History, 2022
Journal of Design History, 2018
Journal of Contemporary History, 2022
Exhibition catalogues by Katarzyna Jezowska
A catalogue of a recent exhibition I curated for the Triennale Museum in Milan in April 2018. It ... more A catalogue of a recent exhibition I curated for the Triennale Museum in Milan in April 2018. It was a historical retrospective of Polish exhibition design and its legacy based on the research I undertook for my doctoral dissertation. Commissioned by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
Conference presentations by Katarzyna Jezowska
World Fairs and International Exhibitions: National self-profiling in an internationalist context... more World Fairs and International Exhibitions: National self-profiling in an internationalist context 1851-1940, workshop at the University of Amsterdam, March 2018
At a meeting held in November 1956 in preparation of the Polish exhibition at the 1958 Brussels W... more At a meeting held in November 1956 in preparation of the Polish exhibition at the 1958 Brussels Worlds Exhibition a member of committee voiced his confusion. ‘In the past,’ he claimed, ‘there were plenty of people who wrote exhibition scripts. We don't know how to do it any longer. In these days,’ he bemoaned, ‘we need a new kind of guidelines, a new way of thinking.’
This opinion was symptomatic for the state of uncertainty that haunted both the public and the bureaucrats after 1953. Stalin’s death led to gradual changes in the system and shifts in nomenklatura. The pace of these events was quick, which left many bureaucrats perplexed and unsure how the situation would develop. The Polish pavilion, just like exhibitions of other socialist countries, aimed to mark a new beginning, legitimise the post-Stalinist power, condemn the past, but not socialism per se. A committee composed of bureaucrats, creative intelligentsia and progressive artists was selected to address this ambitious goal. Nevertheless, none of them actually knew how it could be achieved, which aesthetics should be applied or which historical narratives should be evoked.
By analysing official reports and confidential minutes from the exhibition’s committee meetings held in the midst of the political turmoil, this paper reveals how political changes and the uncertainty that they provoked influenced the way how Poland re-imagined itself in front of the international audience.
Time is a grand narrative, which stabilises past, present and future. Yet, following Jean-Françoi... more Time is a grand narrative, which stabilises past, present and future. Yet, following Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of grand narratives, we trust that multiple temporalities can co-exist with and/or challenge this triumvirate.
In this paper, we aim to question the linear approach to time that prevails in the officially acknowledged Western-oriented narrative of design history. Looking at selected examples from the history of Polish design, we would like to argue that the relation between past, present and future in the less obvious design locations (peripheries?) developed rather in a non-progressive manner.
Over the last century, Poland has witnessed precisely the same design phenomena and tendencies as Western countries, including a few waves of modernism, several craft revivals, technological fascinations and returns to nature. What was particular for the Polish case, however, was the timing and concurrence of those seemingly opposing temporalities: visions of a utopian future were pursued at the same time as attempts to rebuild the past heritage; ideas of progress and modernisation intertwined with nostalgia.
During this period, Poland has experienced numerous incidents that suddenly made time stop, accelerate or reverse, resulting in both official and personal projects being interrupted, banished or postponed. Consequently, this led to a ‘temporal schizophrenia’, a state of discontinuity of linear time and an uncertainty about the historical past, which Frederic Jameson used to characterise the post-modern period. In the case of Poland, this ‘condition’ manifested itself a few decades earlier and its symptoms can be observed in numerous design and architecture projects.
In this paper, we will examine a few examples from the areas of typography and design exhibitions developed in Poland between the 1950s and 70s. Both disciplines had a utilitarian status: they were designed to communicate someone else’s messages, but simultaneously were expressive in their own right, revealing different aspirations, plans and projections.
A research poster presented at the British Association for Slavic and Eastern European Studies An... more A research poster presented at the British Association for Slavic and Eastern European Studies Annual Conference, Cambridge.
This paper analyses the 1st exhibition of the Polish Light Industry held in Moscow between August... more This paper analyses the 1st exhibition of the Polish Light Industry held in Moscow between August and September 1949. Although it was not the first post-war presentations of Polish industry abroad, it seems to be one of the most complex examples, where the contextual information about the country was combined with the commercial display. Worker was at the centre of the exhibition narrative, which was supposed to address contemporary issues of the political discourse. His life, work and wellbeing were determined by big politics. Through exploring the exhibition narrative and the process of its production in a context of economical, cultural and political histories of Poland and Europe, this paper aims to introduce the multidisciplinary phenomena of industrial exhibitions.
The theme of this paper is two-part installation organised in Warsaw in 1974 to celebrate 30 year... more The theme of this paper is two-part installation organised in Warsaw in 1974 to celebrate 30 years of the Polish People’s Republic and the 30th anniversary of Warsaw’s liberation. Using the archival materials, interviews with the installation’s designer and press reviews of that time, this text discloses some information about the event. I will examine it in the context of the official celebrations in socialist Poland suggesting that the installation of 1974 had a different character than any previous event.
The decade of 70s was characterised by an important shift in the Party’s politics. The period of those changes in the official language of propaganda was named “second Poland” manifesting a clear distinction from the previous decades. It was founded on the premises that technocratic government could reform socialism through modernisation processes, rapid industrialisation and advancement of the consumer culture. Jacek Damięcki, young designer and architect who practiced in Candilis-Josic-Woods Paris based studio, was commissioned to design an exhibition that aimed to convey this image.
His spectacular macro-installation constructed in the centre of Warsaw featured glossy objects, colourful cars and modern housing schemes as a part of a bigger narrative presenting history of Poland from the liberation by the Soviet Union to contemporary times. However, the installation also became a platform for design critique trying to shift the audience attention from the sphere of material goods and grand narration into intimate worlds of personal memories.
Through examining the range of objects exhibited and spatial arrangement within which they were presented to the public, the essay provides a case study of an exhibition as a communicating channel between the Party, the audience and the designer both in the political context and from the perspective of the development of new ideas in field of architecture and design.
Organised events by Katarzyna Jezowska
Contemporary European History, 2022
This article examines the Polish exhibit at the International Labour Exhibition in Turin, 1961, w... more This article examines the Polish exhibit at the International Labour Exhibition in Turin, 1961, which presented Poland as a socialist welfare state. By locating the display within the broader historical context of Cold War competitiveness, the article intends to make two points. Firstly, using written and visual sources, this article explores how the humanistic dimension of the socialist welfare project, which remained largely unmatched by the capitalist West, was visualised and rationalised. Effectively, it proposes reading of social benefits and state subsidised services as a novel subject of cultural diplomacy. Secondly, by indicating the role of designers as significant stakeholders who actively shaped the country's self-imagining abroad, this article advances the scholarship about design diplomacy. It evidences that modern design allowed the exhibition makers to convey both symbolic and material aspects of the welfare state, which had at stake the battle for hearts and minds.
In the late 1980s Andrzej Turowski, a prominent Polish art historian coined the term ideoza. He u... more In the late 1980s Andrzej Turowski, a prominent Polish art historian coined the term ideoza. He used it to describe an obsessive situation in which every decision, both personal and institutional, had been conditioned and impelled by a currently dominated ideology. Although Turowski used this portmanteau primarily in the relation to culture, in the later years many researchers claimed that every sphere of peoples’ activity under socialist regime was equally oppressed by the Party-state.
In this paper I examine the 1st Exhibition of Polish Light Industry held in Moscow in 1949. Organised in the very year of the proclamation of Socialist Realism in arts and architecture, the exhibition aimed to redefine Polish national style in the new circumstances. As unpublished archival documents reveal, the bureaucrats, tradesmen and architects involved in the preparation of the event tried to balance the need to acknowledge the ideology and employing the pragmatism of a trade exhibition. In order to understand this challenge, this paper looks up closely at the process of creating the exhibition – forming its rationale, narrative and visual side – and confronts it with (scarce) material illustrating the final outcome presented to the public.
Post-1945 Poland ‒ Modernities, Transformations and Evolving Identities. Working papers, 2016
Analysing the post-war situation in Polish art in the late 1980s Andrzej Turowski coined the term... more Analysing the post-war situation in Polish art in the late 1980s Andrzej Turowski coined the term ideoza. This linguistic blend of words ideology and gnosis was used to describe an obsessive situation in which every decision both personal and institutional is conditioned and impelled by a currently dominated ideology. ‘Ideoza is an ideologically suffused space of beliefs and systems, which restricts the free manifestation of thoughts by preordained and omnipresent perspective,’ Turowski explained in his text. This title condition originally referred to culture, but but in the light of research into socialist Poland that emerged over the last three decades, the term could be easily applied to other spheres of peoples’ activity in a country oppressed by the Party-state. Not undermining the impact of the ideology on life in People’s Poland, could one think of a sphere excluded from that hegemony or of an alternative force that could influence to a comparable extent official actions of the Party-state? In this paper I would like to present a struggle against this ideology centred on the example of the 1st Exhibition of Polish Light Industry in Moscow in 1949. Similar to other international exhibitions and trade fairs organised during the Cold War, the Moscow exhibition became not only a site of convergence, allowing ideas originating from different countries to meet, but also an event where diverse national agendas clashed. Using unpublished archival materials related to the exhibition in Moscow, this paper identifies the issues that ideology was valued against and circumstances in which that took place. In order to address that, it examines the process of creating the exhibition – forming its rationale, narrative and visual side – as well as the final outcome of these efforts presented to the public.
This is the original version of an article presenting history of design in Poland in the 19th and... more This is the original version of an article presenting history of design in Poland in the 19th and 20th century that appeared in "The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design" (2015). During the editing process some significant errors have been introduced to the text by the publisher. The amended text will be published in the 2nd edition of the Encyclopedia and its online version, which will be available in 2017.
A catalogue of a recent exhibition I curated for the Triennale Museum in Milan in April 2018. It ... more A catalogue of a recent exhibition I curated for the Triennale Museum in Milan in April 2018. It was a historical retrospective of Polish exhibition design and its legacy based on the research I undertook for my doctoral dissertation. Commissioned by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
World Fairs and International Exhibitions: National self-profiling in an internationalist context... more World Fairs and International Exhibitions: National self-profiling in an internationalist context 1851-1940, workshop at the University of Amsterdam, March 2018
At a meeting held in November 1956 in preparation of the Polish exhibition at the 1958 Brussels W... more At a meeting held in November 1956 in preparation of the Polish exhibition at the 1958 Brussels Worlds Exhibition a member of committee voiced his confusion. ‘In the past,’ he claimed, ‘there were plenty of people who wrote exhibition scripts. We don't know how to do it any longer. In these days,’ he bemoaned, ‘we need a new kind of guidelines, a new way of thinking.’
This opinion was symptomatic for the state of uncertainty that haunted both the public and the bureaucrats after 1953. Stalin’s death led to gradual changes in the system and shifts in nomenklatura. The pace of these events was quick, which left many bureaucrats perplexed and unsure how the situation would develop. The Polish pavilion, just like exhibitions of other socialist countries, aimed to mark a new beginning, legitimise the post-Stalinist power, condemn the past, but not socialism per se. A committee composed of bureaucrats, creative intelligentsia and progressive artists was selected to address this ambitious goal. Nevertheless, none of them actually knew how it could be achieved, which aesthetics should be applied or which historical narratives should be evoked.
By analysing official reports and confidential minutes from the exhibition’s committee meetings held in the midst of the political turmoil, this paper reveals how political changes and the uncertainty that they provoked influenced the way how Poland re-imagined itself in front of the international audience.
Time is a grand narrative, which stabilises past, present and future. Yet, following Jean-Françoi... more Time is a grand narrative, which stabilises past, present and future. Yet, following Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of grand narratives, we trust that multiple temporalities can co-exist with and/or challenge this triumvirate.
In this paper, we aim to question the linear approach to time that prevails in the officially acknowledged Western-oriented narrative of design history. Looking at selected examples from the history of Polish design, we would like to argue that the relation between past, present and future in the less obvious design locations (peripheries?) developed rather in a non-progressive manner.
Over the last century, Poland has witnessed precisely the same design phenomena and tendencies as Western countries, including a few waves of modernism, several craft revivals, technological fascinations and returns to nature. What was particular for the Polish case, however, was the timing and concurrence of those seemingly opposing temporalities: visions of a utopian future were pursued at the same time as attempts to rebuild the past heritage; ideas of progress and modernisation intertwined with nostalgia.
During this period, Poland has experienced numerous incidents that suddenly made time stop, accelerate or reverse, resulting in both official and personal projects being interrupted, banished or postponed. Consequently, this led to a ‘temporal schizophrenia’, a state of discontinuity of linear time and an uncertainty about the historical past, which Frederic Jameson used to characterise the post-modern period. In the case of Poland, this ‘condition’ manifested itself a few decades earlier and its symptoms can be observed in numerous design and architecture projects.
In this paper, we will examine a few examples from the areas of typography and design exhibitions developed in Poland between the 1950s and 70s. Both disciplines had a utilitarian status: they were designed to communicate someone else’s messages, but simultaneously were expressive in their own right, revealing different aspirations, plans and projections.
A research poster presented at the British Association for Slavic and Eastern European Studies An... more A research poster presented at the British Association for Slavic and Eastern European Studies Annual Conference, Cambridge.
This paper analyses the 1st exhibition of the Polish Light Industry held in Moscow between August... more This paper analyses the 1st exhibition of the Polish Light Industry held in Moscow between August and September 1949. Although it was not the first post-war presentations of Polish industry abroad, it seems to be one of the most complex examples, where the contextual information about the country was combined with the commercial display. Worker was at the centre of the exhibition narrative, which was supposed to address contemporary issues of the political discourse. His life, work and wellbeing were determined by big politics. Through exploring the exhibition narrative and the process of its production in a context of economical, cultural and political histories of Poland and Europe, this paper aims to introduce the multidisciplinary phenomena of industrial exhibitions.
The theme of this paper is two-part installation organised in Warsaw in 1974 to celebrate 30 year... more The theme of this paper is two-part installation organised in Warsaw in 1974 to celebrate 30 years of the Polish People’s Republic and the 30th anniversary of Warsaw’s liberation. Using the archival materials, interviews with the installation’s designer and press reviews of that time, this text discloses some information about the event. I will examine it in the context of the official celebrations in socialist Poland suggesting that the installation of 1974 had a different character than any previous event.
The decade of 70s was characterised by an important shift in the Party’s politics. The period of those changes in the official language of propaganda was named “second Poland” manifesting a clear distinction from the previous decades. It was founded on the premises that technocratic government could reform socialism through modernisation processes, rapid industrialisation and advancement of the consumer culture. Jacek Damięcki, young designer and architect who practiced in Candilis-Josic-Woods Paris based studio, was commissioned to design an exhibition that aimed to convey this image.
His spectacular macro-installation constructed in the centre of Warsaw featured glossy objects, colourful cars and modern housing schemes as a part of a bigger narrative presenting history of Poland from the liberation by the Soviet Union to contemporary times. However, the installation also became a platform for design critique trying to shift the audience attention from the sphere of material goods and grand narration into intimate worlds of personal memories.
Through examining the range of objects exhibited and spatial arrangement within which they were presented to the public, the essay provides a case study of an exhibition as a communicating channel between the Party, the audience and the designer both in the political context and from the perspective of the development of new ideas in field of architecture and design.
This working papers series presents a broad range of research in post-1945 Polish studies gathere... more This working papers series presents a broad range of research in post-1945 Polish studies gathered under the common title 'Post-1945 Poland: Modernities, Transformations and Evolving Identities'. It contains edited versions of papers given at the cross-disciplinary two-day postgraduate conference that was organised by the Programme on Modern Poland (St Antony’s College, University of Oxford) in June 2015.