Doing Dissent & Art Aboveground: The Spaces and Politics of Citizen-Led Counter-Cultures in Warsaw
 

This project examines independent spaces for art as sites of citizen-led political resistance in Warsaw, Poland. In a climate of censorship enforced by PiS, the right-wing party that was in power from 2015 to 2023, an emerging network of independent art venues became safe havens for queer artists as well as platforms for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. This project examines the shifting boundaries of control around and within these spaces, as well as their current engagement in a hostile but changing political context. How do people manipulate available space and create room for exercising agency as they strive towards new modes and new horizons of resistance and belonging?

In the Polish context, the inception of independent art spaces as sites of “artivism” coincided with the re-election of PiS in 2019. Thereafter, national museums, theaters, and galleries underwent a top-down structural intervention and state-mandated transformation in tandem with party politics. Dissident artwork connected to marginalized groups and to LGBTQ+ visibility was perceived as a threat to the official vision of national identity, and was therefore no longer exhibited in any major state-sponsored cultural institution (Kopeć, 2020, Pukaliski, 2016, Sethi et al. 2022). Artists, curators, and cultural administrators alike were well aware of these changes and reacted in a myriad of ways. Responses included participating in public debate, creating subversive public performances, signing petitions, and demonstrating. This project looks at the newest iteration of dissent, which took on a spatial and more established form. An emerging network of independent, “artivist”, project spaces provide a stable context for exhibiting challenging art, representing marginalized artists and identities, and publicly performing political resistance.

Drawing on a political anthropology of dissident art, I examine the activity in and around several independent art venues. Following curators, organizers, artists, and activists, I map various social practices, both on- and offline, that lie somewhere between compliance and resistance. Furthermore, I focus on alternative bureaucratic structures, the tactics by which such spaces are protected legally and financially, and the digital engagements and situated politics of public events and exhibitions. I am particularly interested in how digital forms of engagement create political dialogues between local art worlds and the global art community, which may fold back into local identity politics.

This study looks at autonomous cultural space as an emergent critical sphere where subversive art can be exhibited and archived, and as a stable social space where political alliances can take shape. I argue that the inclusion and visibility of queer artists, feminist issues, and LGBTQ+ identities in the programming of independent venues intervenes in public discourse and ultimately alters a hegemonic narrative in identity politics. Hence, by examining artistic zones as collective sites of negotiation in which citizens test their autonomy, the project contributes to current debates in the study of censorship and protest, and offers new insights on current forms of resistance and civic engagement.