Who Are You? A Tool for Reminding about National Identity

Alicja Patanowska’s discrete installation Who Are You? A Tool for Reminding about National Identity was the only one among all the artistic realisations which met with strong rejection. Ornamented mirrors with an outline of Polish borders hanging on small chains unexpectedly disturbed the function of the place to which they had been assigned, i.e. sites in the park for playing chess, where players meet every day. The installation was quickly dismantled by them and abandoned in the bushes. Thus it became not a classic act of vandalism, but rather a pragmatic gesture of ordering the place which had been ‘devastated’ by the artist.

photo: Justyna Fedec