Rusalka

RAFA JAKUBOWICZ
NIKOLA RADI LUCATI
S OU N D DE SIG N : G OR A N O RG E N I KOL I
CURATION: SELMAN TRTOVAC, NATAA MATUTINOVI

15.6.- 6.7.2012
University library Svetozar Markovi
King Aleksander Blvd. 71, Belgrade

The Purity of Water

Nikola Radi Lucati

Rusalka, a joint show by Rafal Jakubowicz and Nikola Radi Lucati consists of two
works: Swimming pool, a 2003 two-channel video of a site-specific light-projection
by Jakubowicz, and Rusalka, a 2011 series of steel-mounted photographs with an
object-installation by Lucati. Both works, marking the anniversaries of the April 4th
1940 desecration of Poznans synagogue, treating this as a continuing, unfinished
event, refracting the causalities of narrative erasure during the process of adaptation
of several key historical events that have influenced the formation of Poznans
contemporary landscape.
The synagogue, converted into a swimming pool in 1942, has served until today as
a living nazi temple to the health of the body, each swim-stroke taken to wash away
the aura of its faith and culture, still provoking the containment of the suspended
traditions of a lost co-habitative, multicultural and communal life, still seen a
threat to the privatized, re-purposed strategy of petrifying genocide through re-use;
then only recently normalized its evidence in an act of cultural replacement into a
contemporary art-center. The recurring need to justify and mediate the synagogues
right to existence either memorially or functionally, stand in contrast with the
seemingly laconic, self-evident functionality of the swimming pool or a gallery. The
needs chosen to be fulfilled by the replacement, are unveiling the economy of motives
driving the sequence of crimes from genocide toward the subsequent repression
of memory. The remodeling done during the occupation, as well as the subtler
renovations of the space are providing the physical clues of the cultural policy of
normalization in stages - first by physical culture and education, (as sports were

The New Synagogue, Poznan 1907.

The Museum of Family History

often called in repressive regimes); then by contemporary art, offered recently as a

solution. Though at first glance disparate, the two have similar functions, primarily
of isolating and blocking, both the building itself and the context of their own
arrival, while constantly streaming the cultural imperative of the new, in its most
repetitive forms, with every new corporeal or artistic exercise.

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The exhibition is named after the lesser of Poznans two lakes, Malta and Rusalka.
Both were dug by massed forced labor, during the holocaust and war, as well as the
ensuing dictatorship, following the devastation of Polish society under German and
later, Soviet domination. The one improbably permanent act of poetic resistance was
naming the lake after the betrayed nymph. This might have been the only way for the
citizens of Poznan to communicate, through common mythology, the gravity of what
has been done. Without the narrative of revenge and empowerment, or its stately
attributes, Poznans artificial, geographical nymph opens a complex interplay of
symbolic subjugation with the Russian Rusalki; these alchemic transfuigurators
of the pagan realm of the mythos into nationalist imperial soveregnity. Much
more real, as the embodiment of intimate suffering and female suicide, Poznans
Rusalka reflects the waves of empowerment and disenfranchisement in the history
of Wielkopolska and Poznan. Just as Kvapil/Dworaks nymph, she was never meant
to grace the prows of imperial fleet, or empower utilitarian readings of folk tales. She
fulfills the role of a modern heroine far more convincingly; facing love, betrayal and
damnation alone.
The real, public memorial to the victims of Poznans lakes was never erected. An odd
plaque near the Fort VII and a small column, seem lost against the number of sites
involved and the scale of the atrocities. Their memory, having been preserved in
nothing more than a name, remains portable, potentially subversive, their message
still a testament to the severity of the repression and a harbinger of resistance.
Even today, as the symbols and results of the war and dictatorship are being redesigned and pacified through the constant adaptation of their public perception,
the normalization of the methodology behind the acts of genocide and repression

1942 (Poznan) - video, 1996-2002.

Uriel Orlow

still proves difficult to sell, as it is re-tracing the same economic practices original
mass-murders were carried out for. The role of the dominant national culture
becomes that of economically instrumentalized, politically oppressive mechanism of
projection of the cultural hegemony. Within it, the art, contemporary in particular,
is being pushed forward to test and announce the future criteria for the normative
adaptations of the minorities historical narratives, rights and property into the
dominant cultural codes.

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The intervention, both the action and the documentary works, was intended to
underline the transition between two phases of normalization (the physical and the
cultural), when a further step in abolishing the responsibility and guilt is taken by
the opening of the new art-center, further repressing the commemorative in the
public discourse. In choosing the timing for the intervention, as well as the form, (the
exhibition), the authors intention was to provide the context both for the founding
of the art-center, and the art projects that have taken place there previously. The
political, direct communication of Jakubowiczs 2003 light-projection Swimming
Pool and documentary fact branching toward history and mythology in Lucatis
Rusalka, might become the missing elements in the expanding web of works
on Poznans synagogue, and a fitting way to mark the moment of transition into
acceptability of the its new use. In retrospect, it seems almost as if the original video
1942 (Poznan) by Uriel Orlow 1996-2002, the theatrical site-specific installations
Alphabet by Janusz Marciniak as well as the performance House by Adina BarOn in 2006, have all turned out to become the vanguard in the drive to dedicate the
site to contemporary art instead of holocaust remembrance, as the authors originally
intended. In fact, the 2006 was the year demolition of the synagogue was lobbied for
in Poznan, and both Marciniak and Bar-Ons works were part of the drive to save
it. Jakubowicz and Bar-Ons works being essentially about translation, registering
its negation through the use on the wrong language or medium. (Hebrew, instead
of the erased Yiddish; projected light against the performers screams). Marciniak
ceremony, based on the sanctity of the aleph-bet itself, firing its symbols onto the
domes interior, not allowing himself to be constrained by the lack of knowledge of

Alphabet - performance, Poznan 2006.

Janusz Marciniak

the language. Orlows use of Kaddish, a prayer for the dead, showed clearly not only
artists protest and clear stand on whom the synagogue really still belongs to; but
also, the ability to transfer his own suprise to the viewer. There didnts seem to be
any need for translation as well - back in the 90s, he chose to speak of Poznan from
the outside, exposing the permissive authorities rather than communicating with
them directly.

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The artists, having volunteered to intervene, inadvertendly seemed to imply art

as a kind of practical solution for the future of the building. As such strategic
placements have been proposed and executed ahead of the major public projects
by the cultural authorities elsewhere; their works were readily recognized as
useful strategy of respect and subverted by the cultural policy makers of Poznan,
offering contemporary culture as equivalent, alternative replacement for holocaust
remembrance. Following the narrative of the Holocaust and repression through the
story of a single architectural monument in the post-transitory normalization, has
uncovered the resulting continuous adaptation of memory and speech in struggle
for survival of the minority victims communities, leading to the acceptance of the
positions of the dominant majority. The projection of the minority position seemed
to oblige the artists to project it through their own works, speaking in the name of.
That speech, which in honoring the subject, also objectifies and inadvertently subverts
through its fixed, ethical stance, once public, became a target for appropriation, just
as any other public form of communication.
The works presented at the Rusalka show, while forming a mutually supportive
construction, are centered on the inversion of their media roles. A set of static,
photographic objects document the continuing actions forming the process of
normalization. A performative act which, filmed, becomes a document of a condition
- the erasure of a people and its culture that has stopped at the point of the erasure
of the language, again; showing the translation might not be an option that could
still be leading to a hope of a dialogue. The referee tower, rising from lake Malta,
judgment and purity in its whiteness, almost a monument. The new building, with

House - performance, Poznan 2006.

Adina Bar-On

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sloping roofs instead of domes, its socialist wire-mesh glass windows; a memorial
plaque by the entrance debating casuistry with Rabbi Akiva Eger st. sign. The
interior, opening the clean, straight swimming lanes of this private exercise yard,
under the street-lights mounted over the water. The permanence of the photographs
steel backing contrasts the shifting rhythms of the binary channels of Jakubowiczs
videos. His work, is split between two films: One a document of the light projection
of a translation of the buildings function Swimming pool from Polish to Hebrew,
and another, a candid-camera walk through the swimming pool itself, listening in
on the swimmers. The elements disrupting the binary clarity of this show, are the
magnified display of a preserved Rusalka butterfly, in permanent flight over a bed of
sky-blue poison, fixed and distorted by a condenser lens and Goran Nikolis musical
variations on the Dworzaks Ode to the moon from his Rusalka, submerged into
the frequency band of the butterflies, where the hearing, not yet evolved beyond
alarm mechanism, conditions the behavior, establishing fear as the primal response
to music. Both were conceived as the beacons tracing the path of the work from the
documentary, through the mythology to the visceral origins of the Rusalkas aura.
The traces left by the ropes and the falling stars, still linger behind the heavy, locked
doors of the Poznans small Jewish community, a place with a view onto history as it
becomes life again.

Synagogue plaque, Poznan 2007.

Staniislaw Nowak

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Rusalka, exhibition view.

UBSM Art Center, University Library
Svetozar Markovi, Belgrade, 2012.

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-
Indoor swimming-pool,
Wroniecka Street 11a,
Friday, 4 th of April 2003,
Pozna/Poland.
On the 4th of April 1940, the stars on the
domes on the Wroniecka Street synagogue
were taken down with the use of ropes.
[...] Afterwards, city authorities gave order
to transform the building into an indoorswimming-pool 1.
1

Wiesaw Porzycki,
The Obedient Until Death
(the German Officials in Warta Land
1939-1945), Pozna 1997, p. 51.

Rafa Jakubowicz

Swimming Pool, light projection, video 2003.

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Rafa Jakubowicz

Swimming Pool, light projection and video 2003

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Nikola Radi Lucati

Rusalka, latex print on steel, 2012

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Nikola Radi Lucati

Rusalka, latex print on steel, 2012

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Nikola Radi Lucati

Rusalka, latex print on steel, 2012

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Nikola Radi Lucati

Rusalka, specimen, installation view, 2012

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Nikola Radi Lucati

Rusalka, latex print on steel, 2012

Catalog production, photography:

Nikola Radi Lucati
Video stills, photography:
Rafa Jakubowicz
All works and reproductions
owned by respective artists