Wladyslaw Strzeminski’s is perceived as being one of the most prominent Polish avantgarde artists producing art in the spirit of great belief in the powers of Reason. His extraoridinary work To my Friends the Jews was created just after the end of the World War II. It consists of ten collages, neither signed nor dated. Strzeminski combined drawings, photographs (from the ghetto and the death camps) and expressive descriptions. All the representations the artist involved could be perceived as fragments or remnants of the lost archive of the ruined world. Apart from the vio-lence literally present in the representations, there is a certain aggression in the procedures and materials the artist employed: Strzeminski cut out the documentary photographs and glued them to his drawings, drew over the photographs and intervened in their material structure, broke the lines of his poem and opened his work widely for the language of the insanity. One may pre-sume his work represents different degrees and kinds of violence and in the same gesture vio-lently pierces the viewer’s aesthetic and ethical judgements. And yet, in her analysis, Luiza Nader would like to counter the interpretations of this work based on the pattern of trauma stud-ies. She attempts to think about this cycle as a form of ethical and political engagement – sym-bolic violence, beneficial in its painful, affective operations on objects, matter and subjects. She endeavours to trace the signs of violence within the artwork and thinks about them as a form of transgression of void, pain and numbness in the direction of flow of affects. Nader’s analysis will finally create a category of “affective violence”, opening the artwork as the challenge for the subjective change and as a call to remember breaking up with disempowerment, melancholy and solitude.
Luiza Nader is art historian, assistant professor at the University of Warsaw, Institute of Art His-tory. Her interests are focused on avantgarde and neoavantgarde art, affect theories, art histori-ography, memory and archive, exclusively in the Central European context. Currently her research is dedicated to the construction of affective art history after 1939 and its critical potentialities. She published interviews (e.g. interviews with Silvia Kolbowski, Douglas Crimp, Hal Foster, Piotr Piotrowski) and texts in catalogues, periodicals (e.g. Teksty drugie, Artium Quaestiones, Ikonotheka, Obieg, springerin), books and anthologies (e.g. inMemory/haunting/discourse, 2005; Art After Conceptual Art, 2006; Notes From the Future of Art. Selected Writings by Jerzy Ludwinski, 2007; Avant-garde in the bloc, 2009; Wladyslaw Strzeminski. Readibility of images, 2012). Her book Konceptualizm w PRL [Conceptual art in Polish Peoples Republic] released in 2009 was nominated for the prestigious Jan Dlugosz award. She co-curated the exhibition Wlodzimierz Borowski. The net of time (Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, Warsaw, 2010-11). Her next book is dedicated to the series of collages by Wladyslaw Strzeminski To my friends the Jews (1945-1946), its historical/political frames, memory and affective powers.