Radek Przedpełski, “Kinky Sarmato-Baroque—Quantum Tatar Talismans. Eurasian Nomadism and/as a Preposterous History of Polish Contemporary Art”, lecture

The presentation outlines visitations of Eurasian nomadism in Polish contemporary art, which haunt the vision of linear time and of a monocultural vision of Polish history, affording instead opportunities for speculative cosmos-building and spectral incorporations. The lecture will draw a preposterous art history (in the sense of Mieke Bal) linking neo-avantgarde practices in the Polish People’s Republic in the 1970s, emerged under the conditions of “Real Socialism”, to contemporary art - explicitly invoking Polish-Tatar cosmology and magical practices. While the former deterritorialized the colonial “Long Baroque” of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by operationalizing its Tatar, Ottoman, and Persian elements, alongside its mythology of Eastness (Sarmatism). The latter more closely focuses on the Polish northeast region of Podlasie and its entangled intercultural inscriptions. Rather than fetishising nomadic objects as static forms while essentializing its authors, these artistic hauntings elaborate a processual ontology of the nomadic image.