Magdalena Ciemierkiewicz

Curator: Agnieszka Dudek

Singing: Karolina Węgrzyn

The exhibition is inspired by the story of my grandmother, who lived in a wooden house in the village of Koniaczów (Конячів). In her youth, her neighbors were a Ukrainian family. The neighbors remained in close contact, unfortunately, just after the war, in the late ’40s, the Ukrainian family was forcibly displaced as part of the “Vistula action” and their house was burned down. Before they left, they gave my grandmother a wooden table, which later stood in the kitchen of my family home for years. My grandmother was born a Polish woman living in a village with a predominantly Ukrainian population and died in a village that was already entirely Polish, where the memory of the Ukrainian residents had faded.

In the contemporary context of the war in Ukraine and solidarity with refugee women and refugees, the table received from Ukrainian neighbors became a symbol of transnational solidarity, which can allow us to work through the still present traumas related to the history of these areas and also increase mutual openness among Poles and Ukrainians. Microhistories of border areas also show that local communities have the potential to transcend national, religious, and linguistic divisions and that cultural differences need not be a charge of conflict, but rather an opportunity to meet and celebrate.
Part of the exhibition was a video work, a record of my meetings with contemporary residents of my hometown and several neighboring villages around sites that still bear witness to the memory of the former Ukrainian inhabitants and the cultural diversity of the area. The work was realized with guest artist Karolina Wegrzyn, who performed Ukrainian folk songs in the spaces of former Ukrainian villages.