Assembling the ‘Chłopo-Robotnik’: Władysław Hasior (1928-1999) and the Materiality of the Semiperiphery
The talk focuses on the figure of Polish artist Władysław Hasior, whose long artistic career evolved throughout the 1960s and 1970s across a wide range of media, including sculpture, performance art, and photography, as well as the design of several state-commissioned public monuments. While part of the canon of Polish post-war art, his artistic and political position continues to elicit discussion, with recurring accusations which deem his art ‘kitsch’ and the artist himself a proponent of the Communist system.
To navigate this difficult terrain, I want to shift the grounds of the discussion towards a rarely acknowledged, yet central category, which powerfully shaped Hasior’s practice: the question of class within the allegedly ‘classless’ society of the Polish People’s Republic after 1956. To approach this perspective, I propose a materialist lens, reframing 1960s-70s Poland not merely as a totalitarian state, but as a semiperiphery within the global world-system. This allows for an analysis of the era's uneven modernization—a process built on the central, hybrid figure of the chłoporobotnik (peasant-worker). I argue that Hasior’s artistic language of assemblage functions as a material registration of this fractured semi-peripheral condition, where advanced industrialization collided with persistent agrarian realities.
This talk represents a chapter of a larger book project entitled Peripheral Vision: Towards A Materialist History of Modern Art From Poland under contract with Manchester University Press.
Image: Film still from Wezwanie [The Summons], directed by Wojciech Solarz, 1971
RSVP Agnes Bendik at
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