Lublin, Poland, hosted an international political/artistic Festival Transeuropa on the rights of women, minorities and refugees, on hospitality and on artistic freedom. Through exhibitions, performances, debates and workshops, it fostered the acceptance of LGBTQ community, feminism and transnational cultures. The Festival tried to remember and revive the murdered interculturality of the city. Before the Holocaust, Lublin was a major centre of Jewish culture; that is why we organized a number of talks on Jewish life: about the rebellious women coming originally from the Lublin area (Rosa Luxemburg, Bela Shapira, Nan Goldin), Goncourt-winning writer Anna Langfus, and a conversation with Professor Irena Grudzinska-Gross of Princeton who demonstrated Poland’s anti-Semitism in her book Golden Harvest, co-authored with Jan Tomasz Gross. At Tektura alternative collective, Grenoble-Lublin poet Adrien Gros read his poetry on looking for his own Jewish roots in this city. The transnational character of Lublin was further explored in the presentations by Roma and Ukrainian communities. We also met with Chechen refugees who presented their precarious situation: exclusion, unemployment, problems with education and residence. Chechens feel neglected by the municipal institutions.
Gender and queer culture was another aspect developed in the Festival, vital to this city where the political class has turned religion into an ideology. Feminism and homosexuality were examined in the exhibitions mounted especially for Transeuropa: Love Is Love, The Body, The City of Love, and The Madonnas. Curated by Pawel Leszkowicz at Labirynt Gallery, Love Is Love—Art as LGBTQ Activism: from Britain to Belarus surveyed performative campaigns for lesbian and gay visibility across Europe; through the video art of Igor Grubic (Croatia) and Bergamot (Belarus), it showed the burning issues of anti-gay violence in Belgrade, Zagreb and Minsk. The exhibition was accompanied by a discussion on Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka, feminist and LGBT rights advocate, killed in the Smolensk air crash. She was instrumental in mounting Poland’s lesbian and gay visibility campaign, Let Us Be Seen, presented at Love Is Love. In the context of this exhibition, together with invited panelists, we participated in lively debates over “Art as Performing Human Rights” and “Art as Gender and LGBTQ Activism.”
Tomek Kitlinski
Pawel Leszkowicz's curatorial tour of Transeuropa exhibition "Love Is Love. Art as LGBTQ Activism: from Britain to Belarus" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFdx_bUJSiw&hd=1
Please see more on Transeuropa Lublin at http://www.newschool.edu/tcds/subpage.aspx
