A Right-Wing Polish Politician Is Suing a Curator for Commissioning a Memorial to Victims of the Holocaust

A Polish art historian and curator who commissioned a memorial
to victims of the anti-Jewish pogroms is being sued for defamation
by an incoming member of parliament.

After Tomasz Kitliński commissioned the work, titled
Judenfrei by the artist Dorota
Nieznalska, for the Open City Festival in Lublin, the
region’s far-right nationalist governor Przemysław Czarnek
demanded its removal because he considered it
“anti-Polish. Kitliński defied the order.

In October, Czarnek took to state television to object to the
work, which takes its name from a Nazi term for a region that had
been “cleansed” of Jews. Memorializing the victims of the Holocaust
is a touchy subject in Poland. Since 2018, the country’s government
has made it illegal to blame Poland for the atrocities committed on
its soil by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Nieznalska said she was “not surprised” that a government
official called for the removal of her work. “In Poland, there has
been an official ban on criticizing historical memory for a long
time,” she told Artnet News in an email. “In this case, of course,
it was a denial of the fact that the Poles pogromed the Jewish
community during or just after World War II.”

The artwork came down after the festival ended on October 11,
but the controversy flared up again when the Marie Curie-Skłodowska
University in Lublin, where Kitliński teaches, awarded Czarnek
an honorary medal. In response, the art historian took to the
internet to protest the celebration of the politician.

“The governor of Lublin Region prides himself in offending
Ukranians, Muslims, the LGBT community, and women, for whom he sees
no social role other than the reproduction of children,” he wrote
in an online letter,  reported by the Art
Newspaper.

Czarnek is now taking legal action. He has the backing of Radio
Maryja, a religious radio station that’s been condemned by the
Anti-Defamation League, and which airs regular criticism of
Kitliński. Should he be found guilty, Kitliński could spend up
to two years in jail, the maximum penalty for slandering a
public official under Polish penal code.

Kitliński plans to mount a defense on the grounds of free
speech, which is protected in the Polish Constitution. “What’s
happening to me is also a threat to the Polish art world,”
Kitliński told the Art Newspaper. “Our tradition here of
critical art will be threatened, punished, and destroyed.” He
sees the case against him as a way for the government “to send a
signal of intolerance to the population at large.”

Intellectuals from around the world have spoken out
in Kitliński’s defense. A petition decrying the
“wave of ultra-nationalist far-right social prejudice that is
working its way into the institutions of Poland” and
supporting Kitliński has nearly 760
signatories, including literary scholar Irena Grudzińska
Gross, Courtauld art historian Sarah Wilson, and Los Angeles artist
Simone Gad.

The New School in New York
City, where Kitliński received a Fulbright scholarship, has called
on its community to “support Kitliński’s freedom of speech and his
fight against racism, xenophobia, and homophobia in Poland” by
adding their names.

“The case of Tomasz Kitliński,” said Nieznalska, the artist
behind the pogrom memorial, “is proof of the lack of democracy,
free speech in Poland.”

The post A Right-Wing Polish Politician Is Suing a Curator
for Commissioning a Memorial to Victims of the Holocaust
appeared first on artnet News.