The persistence of history: three satellite shows accompanying the inaugural Lodz Biennale offered visitors a rare all-Polish contemporary art experience

When curator Aneta Szylak was offered the Poznanski Palace, now Lodz's history museum, as a venue for the first Biennale of Polish Art, she insisted on using the entire building, not just the temporary exhibition spaces. Szylak, who had worked in a history museum early in her career, saw it as the perfect setting for a confrontation of art and history. The block-long neo-Baroque pile, which Jewish industrialist and philanthropist Israel Poznanski, Lodz's "King of Cotton," began to build in 1898, is the most prominent starving evidence of the large role played by Jews--once nearly a third of Lodz's population--in the history of the "Polish Manchester." The building is a short walk from the former Lodz Ghetto, whose inhabitants were liquidated by the Nazis in August 1944.

The ambitious program devised by Szylak, a Gdansk-based critic and curator known for inventive exhibitions that incorporate architectural and social contexts, aimed to contrast the ornate palace interior, which includes preserved private rooms of the family, and two sorts of galleries-the traditional ones with permanent historical displays and the modern-style white cubes for temporary exhibitions. Approximately two dozen individual artists and art teams participated.

Titled "The Palimpsest Museum," the exhibition, one of three all-Polish shows accompanying last fall's first-ever international Lodz Biennale [see p. 54], explored how the status of a displayed art object might change in reference to such historical types of exhibition space, freighted with cultural meanings. Szylak hoped the works' visible and invisible contexts would influence their interpretation. Poland's anguished history is unquestionably at the heart of some of the country's most compelling contemporary art, but the show's bookish title did not capture the urgency of this theme. More expressive of the situation for today's Polish artists was Agnieszka Kalinowska's video installation Emergency Exit (2003), in which desperate figures were seen clambering hand-over-hand across the top of an ornate wall in the former ballroom, as if escaping from a conflagration like characters in Raphael's Fire in the Borgo.

A lighter-hearted "palimpsest" was Janek Simon's amusing Carpet Invaders (2002), for which the screen view of the classic arcade game Space Invaders was redesigned with a border like that of a Caucasian prayer rug. In a darkened room, it was projected onto the floor in front of an antique desk, where it resembled an actual rug--except for being surrounded by visitors using controllers to blast aliens.

One challenge for non-Polish visitors (and maybe some Polish ones as well) was recognizing all of the art as art. Szylak went so far as to omit exhibition signage in several cases, aiming to meld seamlessly the temporary artwork installations and the permanent displays. For example, Hanna Nowicka's Nymph was an unsigned intervention consisting of an unusually thick sprinkling of dust at the base of a statue of a nymph; Nowicka also made a monument of dust--taken from one of the textile factories of Lodz--presenting a column of it within a Plexiglas obelisk. Conceptual artist Leszek Przyjemski contributed a placard, resembling standard museum signage, that simply identified his ongoing--and apparently objectless--Museum of Hysterics as part of the show.

In a wide passageway, Karolina Wysocka set up parallel rows of connected clear glass stanchions. The work, titled Cautiously (2002), perfectly realized Szylak's aim of rendering "transparent" the museum's venerable devices for guiding visitors, while speaking to the pervasiveness and also the fragility of institutional control. Collective behavior and institutional mechanisms were also the subject of Ania Witkowska's Pictograms (2003). Less interested in content, a la Matt Mullican, than function, she replaces existing pictographic signage with alternative (but still meaningful) versions that playfully subvert social conventions. In place of an emergency-exit figure running down stairs, for example, she offers a similar figure on a treadmill. More sinister in its implications was Grzegorz Klaman's Israel Kalmanowicz Poznanski's Chrono-Spaces (2004), for which a laptop computer that seemed strangely at home on the ornate desk in the industrialist's former office was programmed to show slowly panning surveillance-camera images, recorded before the exhibition, of the palace spaces, empty of visitors, guards or artistic interventions. The space of the museum as a whole was approached in a more positive spirit in Christian Tomaszewski's installation 3 x 9 (2004), a collaboration with a feng shui specialist to bring good energy to the museum and neutralize negative influences. Here the treasure-hunt aspect of the show was taken to an extreme, as visitors were provided a brochure with directions for discovering inconspicuous interventions. Finds included origami birds, goldfish in a bowl, fresh fruits and flowers, boiled eggs, crystals and images of dragons.