17’25”

Commissioned by the Zachęta National Gallery in Warsaw as part of the exhibition What Are Our Collective Dreams? Global Connections – Abandoned Friendships, the work emerged from the archival research into the history of exhibitions staged at Zachęta inside the period of socialist Poland. Let me Speak video restores presence to artists from countries of the global majority, shifting attention from artworks to people, from representation to lived experience, from history written down to history spoken aloud.

In their native languages—Vietnamese, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Arabic, and Spanish – the titles of artworks shown in group exhibitions between 1959 and 1981 in the Gallery, become not visible but audible, recited and recorded by members of contemporary Warsaw diasporas. Their voices, partly inaccessible, operate in another register: they reconstruct the original exhibitions as memory, affect, and duration, resonating inside exhibition spaces of Zachęta.

Marysia Lewandowska approaches archival research not only as a source of knowledge, but also as an ethical and political gesture and a way of queering history, unsettling its hierarchies and monolithic narratives. What emerges is an imagined exhibition: accessible through sound and image, open to a plurality of languages, identities, and experiences, and at the same time attentive to what eludes our full understanding in reading histories. Text by Taras Gembik