A History of Subjection and Its Possible Termination
by Stach Szabłowski

The way in which Katarzyna Swinarska constructs her project entitled Innocent Colonies recalls throwing a pebble into a body of standing water. The artist hits a point from which circles spread out, covering a wider and wider space. Meanwhile the pebble sinks, moving down toward ever deeper strata of meanings.

But what are these “waters” into which Swinarska throws her “pebble”? We can imagine them as a reservoir into which various discourses flow. Among them is the artist’s individual perspective, her painting, and her family history. There is the figure of an old woman who needs care, and the experience of Olga Kachurovska, the Ukrainian foreign-worker who provides the care. There is the contemporary issue of the situation of immigrants who come to Poland to earn a living, especially those arriving from the Ukraine, and there are historical matters concerned with Polish-Ukrainian relations and their colonial aspects. There is also the question of class differences, which involve national prejudices and the mechanisms of economic exploitation. And there is the even more universal issue of women’s social status—women who are subjected to oppression and discipline in a patriarchal order, one so organized that its victims themselves, whether they want to or not, participate in the re-staging of the scripts of power and subordination.

When the currents of all these discourses reach one reservoir, there is no way to separate them from each other and no way to understand one apart from all the others. It is impossible to penetrate the meaning of a personal history without a consciousness of the social context in which it is inscribed. And vice versa – the road to a critical interpretation of social relations is to trace the paths of individual experience, in which the nature of those relations is made manifest. From the point in which a situation taken from (an individual) life is played out, the circles spread over the mixed waters of various discourses, reaching into the past and its consequences, and further toward the economic, class, gender, and emotional conditions of the present moment. Meanwhile, the pebble that the artist has thrown into the middle of this situation falls deeper and deeper down, toward the esthetics, dramaturgy, and politics of the subordination that is the key theme of Innocent Colonies.

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The emigrant is the most up-to-date, the clearest figure of the Other in relations in which European society of the second decade of the twenty-first century recognizes its identity and marks out its borders. Today the most vital political projects are constructed around the issue of migration. All it took was a few million refugees from the Middle East to destabilize the liberal political order that had functioned in Western Europe since the introduction of the Marshall Plan. With a certain degree of delay, Poland has entered into the orbit of this discourse. Against the background of a multi-cultural continent, Polish society is mono-ethnic in an unprecedented way. Historically, Poland has been, above all, an “exporter” of emigrants of both genders; in the first years after accession to the European Union, migration in Poland meant, above all, the departure of Poles from Poland. In the last several years, Poland—for the first time in its recent history—has also become a place to which migrants come. The most common immigrant to Poland has a Ukrainian face. In Swinarska’s project, it is the face of Olga Kachurovska, a young woman who has come from western Ukraine to work as a care-provider.

Kachurovska’s employer is Swinarska’s mother, and her patient, Halina Hellmann, is the artist’s one-hundred-and-five-year-old grandmother. The issue of migration is made actual in a “performative” situation by women who belong to different generations and are divided by class and social differences, but exist within a network of complex mutual relations. In addition, these relations develop against a specific historical background, and the history in question here follows something in the manner of a circle. The artist’s grandmother was born into a prosperous Polish landed family in the Ukraine. In keeping with the customs of her social class, she was fed by a wet nurse whom her mother had brought from the countryside, a Ukrainian peasant woman. Now, in a very different time, Halina Hellmann once more needs care and at her side there appears a woman from the Ukrainian countryside. So at the start and the end of the life of the artist’s grandmother, there is the figure of the nurse, the Other and intimate at once.

In the knot of time closed by the figure of the Ukrainian care-giver, there lies a concrete biography, but also an allegory that Swinarska extracts from this complex. In the light of her project, Halina Hellmann’s long life appears as a kind of bridge between a postmodern (and post-colonial) present and a post-feudal past.

Post-colonial studies and criticism are a tool that Poles have discovered only relatively recently as instruments that help them to know their own past and the current state of affairs that is the consequence of that past. As a people who did not take part in Europe’s colonial expansion, Poles thought themselves excluded from this discourse. However, the use of post-colonial theory to describe the realities of the Eastern Borderlands have made it possible to understand better the social configuration of that part of the world, one that surprisingly accurately reproduces the models of the exercise of power, subordination, exploitation, and symbolic and actual violence developed by Western Europeans in the process of colonizing societies beyond Europe. Implementing this universal script in the Eastern Borderlands, Poles took the roles of those who bore a civilizing mission. The inhabitants of the Eastern European countries that became the objects of Polish domination, especially Ukrainians, were given the roles of “locals,” objects of a “civilizing” process that masked exploitation and subjugation. During the childhood of Swinarska’s grandmother (she was born in 1914), this colonial order was supplemented by class divisions, a relic of a feudalism that had not yet finally been overcome in Eastern Europe.

In the circle of time that the artist draws, we also see a more general principle relating to emigration, which is often a continuation of colonial history. The master motif that links together successive chapters of this history is inequality. Swinarska looks at inequality from different points of view. Among these is the perspective of the documentary film maker. In one of the films that make up Innocent Colonies, the artist conducts an interview with Klaudia Iwicka, an activist who is in charge of the Center for the Support of Immigrants. We could easily imagine material like this outside the context of art. Swinarska asks about the social and legal situation of Ukrainian immigrants in Poland; Iwicka sets out the facts. There is a focus on female immigrants; women often work as care-providers for children and the elderly, and they work as home-helps. This kind of work, de facto usually illegal, has no clearly designated scope of duties. Theoretically, it is hired labor; in practice, however, it is easily, in fact, unavoidably, part of the institution of unpaid female labor. Care of a child or an elderly person or running a home—these are not tasks that have a beginning and an end, for housework has no end. For a woman who is in a foreign country, is not employed under formal and legal conditions, and lives in her employers’ home, it is very difficult to set boundaries. If we add to this the economic necessity that is the cause of emigration, we can see that we are dealing with a person who is in the weakest of social positions, at the mercy of the good will of those who employ her.

This is the situation in which Olga Kachurovska finds herself. In a succession of scenes in Innocent Colonies, Swinarska increasingly reduces the distance, narrows the perspective: the abstract figure of the Ukrainian economic immigrant is filled out by the experience of a concrete person. In one film, Swinarska shows Kachurovska’s daily work with the woman she cares for. In another, Swinarska speaks with the care-provider on the subject of the emotional dimension of her work. In yet another, Kachurovska sings Ukrainian songs to music coming from a mobile phone. Part of Swinarska’s exhibition is also made up of the love letters written (on a phone) to the husband left behind in the Ukraine. From this mosaic of scenes, conversations, and words, a picture emerges of a double emotional entanglement. Care for an elderly woman is not simply work but also an inter-personal relation, one that develops in the shadow of a longing for home, in the shadow of a parting of lovers. In order to become a part of an alien life, the female migrant must abandon her own; this dimension of her work can never be calculated into her wages.

In the key element in the exhibition, the title film Innocent Colonies, Swinarska radically goes beyond the documentary perspective, and moves toward an emotional crisis point. She puts Olga Kachurovska to bed, and herself stands over her dressed in an old-fashioned dress with a corset. This outfit, made in the manner of the early twentieth century, emphasizes the artist’s position as the heiress to a specific tradition and, perhaps, to a responsibility as well. In the situation staged by Swinarska, the roles are perversely inverted. The woman who is supposed to work lies in bed, while the woman who belongs to a family of employers stands in a stiffened pose and conducts a conversation that goes further and further beyond Kachurovska’s zone of comfort. Swinarska asks her about the compromises and humiliations that are part of the migrant woman’s condition. It is not a conversation that is comfortable for the protagonist of Innocent Colonies, especially in that (lying down) position in which she does not feel at home; to lie down before those on whom she is dependent is not part of the order that organizes the choreography of the emigrant woman’s body. To put a good face on things is a basic element of survival strategy in emigration; to find oneself in a situation of subjugation is potentially humiliating. This potential is, however, dormant as long as one does not speak of it; it is conjured up only if things are called by their real names, before others and before oneself.

Migrant women bear their fates because they must. If the women who employ them abuse their power, it is because they can. It’s better for migrants in the new country anyway, otherwise they wouldn’t have come, would they? Imagining the difference between a better “here” and a worse “there” creates a dangerous grey area, in which the dignity and well-being of migrants undergo a relativization and are measured by another and lower standard. In this equation, which—because it is based on inequality—it is hard to solve correctly and decently, there are, however, more variables. In the middle of the exhibition, the artist, who has concentrated on the figure of Kachurovska, turns from her protagonist and creates an installation entitled The School For Wives , something in the manner of an audio-visual collage. It consists of the covers of advice-books for women from the early twentieth century and of pseudo-scientific treatises from that time on women’s psychology and physiology. Swinarska juxtaposes these old-fashioned texts with her own pictures, in which she portrays women from her own family, and also with archival photographs. Several come from family collections and show the male and female ancestors of the artist and the landowners’ world in which Halina Hellmann grew up. One photograph turns out to be a stylized piece however: a seemingly archival photograph is that of Swinarska herself dressed up as a lady of the period. Other photographs are simply found images, documenting the lives of other families. A personal history is once again projected on to a wider background. But what kind of landscape is that? It is filled with the artist’s voice reading extracts from the books that she brought to life in The School For Wives. We do not hear anything that we did not know before, but still the discourse that subjugates and disempowers women, objectifies their bodies, disciplines their work, and monitors their existence, is shocking, if not so much because of the content, which we know, but because of their language. Violence is naked. In the context of Innocent Colonies, it is important to realize that women from the privileged classes, for the heritage of which Swinarska in this exhibition takes a type of moral or, at least, artistic responsibility, were themselves also the objects of that violence. Swinarska’s installation splendidly reveals the diabolic aspect of patriarchy, which not only subjects women to oppression from without, but also trains them for mutual self-repression and self-discipline. The ideal prison is the one in which the imprisoned are each other’s warders. In Swinarska’s work, we see the relay-race of trauma, the transmission of subjugation, which is passed on from the upper class to the lower, but also from generation to generation.

Among the excerpts of archival texts chosen by the artist concerning the organization of female existence, there is a passage about the recruitment of wet-nurses. The author notes that the wet-nurse when she feeds her employers’ child, whether she wants to or not, often neglects her own child. And it happens that the insufficiently nourished, biological child falls ill and dies. But that is all for the better: “having lost her own baby, the distraught woman becomes more strongly attached to her (not her own) milk baby". And all this happened not so long ago; from the times in which such a discourse could be openly articulated, we are separated by the life of only one woman, that of the artist’s grandmother, Halina Hellmann.

The history of women’s subjugation, seemingly distant, playing itself out as it were in a costume drama, turns out to be close, and its persistence casts a long shadow on relations among women in the twenty-first century, within the artist’s family whose grandmother is cared for by a Ukrainian care-giver. Is it possible to interrupt this sequence of subjugation, passed on in time and space, like some poisoned inheritance? One can see the exhibition Innocent Colonies as an attempt to deconstruct this vicious circle. To do so demands giving form to women’s experience (including the artist’s), experience that is interwoven with such a complex set of relations, wrapped up in historical, economic, and cultural determinants. It is necessary to seek out images that represent this experience, making it visible and audible. It is necessary even to dress up in a dress from one’s great-grandmother’s time and dust off old photographs. It is vital to play certain roles in order to live through it once more, consciously to the end and for the last time. But that which cannot be articulated in document, discourse, or re-staging, Swinarska speaks of through painting. It does not often happen that, in a project that looks so directly at social issues as Innocent Colonies does, female and male artists use painting, and especially expressional abstract forms. But within these pictures, Swinarska takes up the narrative at the center of which stands the figure of Olga Kachurovska. Several of these paintings, for example, the organic Biophilia, were originally produced outside the context of Innocent Colonies. Others like Loves – violent, in blacks and reds, inspired by motifs from Ukrainian folklore – were painted by Swinarska specially for inclusion in the exhibition. Now the forms of both kinds of painting are permeated by the content of Innocent Colonies; they cannot be viewed without the filter of the narrative provided here. And vice versa: painting, color, and abstract forms cast their light on the narrative. In order fully to experience the situation presented by Swinarska, it is not enough to get to know the history cited here; it is not even enough to understand a case in all its complexity. It is necessary to experience it and find a form for that experience, just as Swinarska has done by painting the images that form the particular landscape, the painter’s landscape in which Innocent Colonies are played out.