Nations and Stereotypes

History teaches us that international relations are strongly contingent on our representations of others. Even if the beliefs we live by do not find corroboration in reality, we are reluctant to discard stereotypes or prejudice, which Ambrose Bierce called “a vagrant opinion without visible means of support”.
Thinking of stereotypes is deeply vested in culture, history, and collective memory. It reflects more than real, ancient or recent conflicts, yet it cannot be disconnected from them entirely. After all, stereotypes are born from tension and rivalry, frustration and aggression.
Gordon Allport was right to note that stereotyping is “the law of least effort”. It provides relief from reflecting on what the world is really like, even if it does result in harmful simplifications. This is especially true for national stereotypes, which, once formed, seem impervious to revision or modification. The most efficient means for changing them can in fact be the political situation. We need not seek far and wide; this is happening before our very eyes. Today, Poland and Germany are connected by friendly relations, and moreover Germany is among Israel’s greatest friends in Europe, while it is the tie between Ukraine and Russia that is undergoing the toughest test.
Nothing, therefore, is granted once and for all. Even stereotypes are not set in stone.

To brand all feelings or structures of nationalism or nationhood as fundamentally power‑oriented and aggressive, and hence morally repugnant, is both theoretically and historically wrong, and ultimately also morally blind.

Our knowledge results from the fact that these and other designates had already been assigned a certain stereotypical value earlier, before us. This is why we automatically connect certain general truths with them. We do not invent them; we inherit them.

We can easily recognise that the essential divide in the country is not between the proverbial East and West, or ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians, or Russophones and Ukrainophones. It is primarily between the past and the future, Soviet and anti‑Soviet, patron‑clientelistic and civic.

Poland is an East that is trying to escape from the East. This eternal standing in the corridor between East and West engendered a kind of schizophrenia in the Polish people.

The last decade was a period of a less or more valuable, but still visible, reworking of the Polish identity in culture.

The ideologists of the Macedonian right seem to believe that by raising substitutes of architecture from the distant past they will pass the values preached by “their” predecessors (yet defined and determined currently) so that they will become equally bfamiliar to posterity.

Łukasz Trzciński talks to Magdalena Petryna and explains an idea of his photo project "New Europe. Atlas"

Mirosław Bałka and Kasia Redzisz talk to Monika Rydiger and Natalia Żak

Stefan Kraus, director of the Kolumba Museum, talks to Żanna Komar

Having contact with the original artwork leads to one’s own discoveries, which I like to call a museum’s scientificity. In the perception of objects, architecture and collections, it is not so much about what is “old” and “new”, but rather about how their presence and simultaneity interact.

At the turn of the century, contemporary art, invisible to a majority of the society, became not only very much visible in the media discourse, thanks to the generation of such artists as Rajkowska, born in the 1960s and generally associated with the formula of critical art, but also seeable (as a problem) because of the questions it tackled.

"Aleksander Gierymski 1850–1901"
The National Museum in Warsaw
20 March – 10 August 2014

"Maksymilian Gierymski: works,inspirations, reception"
The National Museum in Krakow
25 April – 10 August 2014

André Köhler,
"Odra_Rhein_Oder_Ren Fotoessay"
Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg 2011

Frank Westerman, "Czysta biała rasa. Cesarskie konie, genetyka i wielkie wojny"
(lit.: Pure White Breed. Imperial Horses, Genetics, and Great Wars)
Wydawnictwo Czarne, Wołowiec 2014

On a continent proud of cultural diversity, it is worth working towards a situation where borders stand for integration rather than rupture. Europe has much to do in order to find some balance between centres and peripheries.