Zachęta National Gallery of Art

curator: Julia Leopold

'As a People’s Army soldier, I fought the German occupier. Towards the end of the war, I was assigned to serve in the security services. I went through all the levels of professional career…’ begin Franciszek Szlachcic’s memoirs, The Bitter Taste of Power. A communist Party apparatchik during the People’s Poland period, a highranking state security official, Minister of Internal Affairs in 1971, Edward Gierek’s second in command and for two years, until 1976, Deputy Prime Minister. He came from a poor working-class family and socialism made it possible for him to climb to the top echelons of power. In 1976, he was ousted, losing all the privileges enjoyed by communist VIPs at the time: high salary, service car, bodyguard protection, personal driver, government ‘hotline’ at home, bonuses, extras. Virtually all he was left was a dacha he had built a few years earlier in Magdalenka, a posh Warsaw suburb. It is there that Anna Senkara, a young artist studying in Prof Grzegorz Kowalski’s Audiovisual Space Studio at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts has filmed an interview with Franciszek Szlachcic’s son, Roman. The man lives in the past, dwelling on memories of his father’s power and might. Another person that appears in the film is Jacek Niedzielak, whose story could serve as a basis for another film. The formally simple work reveals in a subtle manner various themes concerning history, politics and power, as well as intimate feelings and emotional ties. It is not just a portrayal of a fascinating story of a once-powerful politician, let alone an attempt to accuse or justify – it is, in fact, a story about the son, even though the protagonist hardly speaks about anyone but his father. The title of the film and the exhibition does not specify which of the Szlachices – father or son – it refers to.

Archival materials from a wild boar hunting create the framework for Senkara’s film. The bloody scenes bring to mind the well-known 1964 hunting photo, in which Nikita Khrushchev puts his foot on a dead boar. Among the participants of that hunt were also Władysław Gomułka and Józef Cyrankiewicz, two most powerful people in Poland at the time. According to Roman Szlachcic, the hunt was famous because only his father managed to shoot a boar.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with Anna Senkara’s text about her meetings with Roman Szlachcic (between February and May 2009) and fragments of Franciszek Szlachcic’s unpublished notes from 1975. The catalogue is illustrated with, among other things, photographs from the Szlachcic family archive.