Late Polishnes, Forms of national identity after 1989, The Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art

The project Late Polishness is dedicated to the forms which Polish contemporary identity assumes. Acting as the main space for deliberations is the exhibition, which consists of more than a hundred works and projects from dozens of contemporary artists working in the fields of visual arts, cinema, and theatre.

The key to the Late Polishness used in the project is the category of form. How is Polishness experienced today? How is it represented? Behind what images, symbols, figures, and narratives does it hide? The curators of the project have been searching for the answers to these questions in various fields of art, because it is the artists who give form to the collective imagination, and also to the national. Artists from varying generations have been invited to partake in the project.

The implementation of the project Late Polishness required the confrontation of notions, which have been engrained into past generations,regarding the essence of Polishness with such ideas, forces and processes as neoliberal capitalism, the transition from an industrial economy to one based on knowledge, the postcolonial condition, emancipatory discourses of minorities, the new dynamics of the flow of information related to the development of cyberspace, multiculturalism, and the global perspective.Late Polishness is a sense of national belonging, experienced in an era defined by the prefix post: postmodernism, postcolonialism,postindustrializm. Participants of the exhibition and the discussions part of it will face the question of how the Polish form developed after 1989 under these conditions.