An the German-Polish border there will be a new wall by October. She set up an art shipping company on the Oder Promenade in Frankfurt at the Stadtbrücke, which leads to Słubice in Poland. The wall is three meters high and has fragments of glass reaching into the sky. One hundred residents came to the inauguration of the work by Warsaw artist Joanna Rajkowska at the invitation of the European University Viadrina. They speak German, Polish and Ukrainian. The 48 concrete elements look like a labyrinth that gets in the way of walkers and cyclists. Protests have already been raised in local discussion forums. If you zoom up from the summer scenery with a drone, you can see the title of Rajkowska’s work. The profile of the wall parts gives the word “Sorry”.
Rajkowska calls her work “counter-monument”. The wall that has been erected on the Polish-Belarusian border since 2021 was the starting point for her work. There, Polish border guards systematically use illegal pushbacks to prevent people from Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria from applying for asylum. According to the Polish initiative Grupa Granica, 38 people have died since then as a result of cold, exhaustion or injuries sustained when crossing the border. “This is not a work of art about German-Polish relations, but about the core of the European community,” says Rajkowska. The new location of “Sorry” on the banks of the Oder is also significant, as the river is again threatened with fish death when temperatures rise in summer.
“Sorry” was previously shown on the premises of a private university in Warsaw. The work was commissioned by the Zachęta Art Society in Poznań and will be on display there in the future at the city’s central Kaponiera roundabout. In Warsaw, Rajkowska showed with an artificial palm tree in Jerusalem Avenue how a single work can write both art and city history. The palm tree has been a landmark since it was erected in 2002 and remained on Charles de Gaulle Square in the center of the Polish capital even after the art event ended. The fact that art production in Poland, even in times of national tones from the Ministry of Culture, is still closely linked to global search movements is due, as in the case of “Sorry”, to the density of art associations and exhibition centers at provincial and metropolitan level, which had already taken care of this before 1989 that the most important positions of domestic contemporary art are represented in Polish collections.
A universal answer
From a bird’s eye view, the city bridge between Frankfurt and Słubice shows how the situations in eastern and western Poland are directly connected. In the spring of 2023, the state of Brandenburg introduced veil manhunts on a plateau directly above Rajkowska’s artwork. Although these are not supposed to be stationary controls, Federal Police team buses are on the bridge around the clock and stop vehicles. The routes of an increasing number of people who come to Poland via Belarus or Slovakia and want to get to Germany lead over the Oder Bridge.
With the arrival of Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries, who had been financed by the Russian state for years, in the Republic of Belarus, the Polish-Belarusian border became the focus of Polish domestic politics. Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński has already pointed out the increasing danger of provocations. With this justification, he could theoretically declare a state of emergency along the Wall in eastern counties to prevent the parliamentary elections scheduled for October from being held. It is already clear that Kaczyński will make migration a key issue in his election campaign. With “Sorry”, Joanna Rajkowska has found a universal answer to counter these political tricks to stay in power with a clearly understandable “No”.
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