COURAGE

Mbledhje koleksionesh

There are three wraps in the collection. These wraps were used by Paulis Kļaviņš and other activists in Hilfsaktion Märtyer-Kirche (HMK) and the 'Action of Light' in street actions in West Germany and France in 1983. Two are made from brown-coloured fabric, the third is made from black-coloured fabric. On the wraps are printed portraits of Soviet political prisoners: Dmitry Minyakov, Vytautas Skuodis and Lidija Doroņina-Lasmane, and inscriptions such as: 'Die Verfolgten in der Sowjetunion berätingen unsere Solidarität'. These wraps are used by the museum in a multimedia exhibition.

After her return from Czechoslovakia on 10 February 1946, Mērija Grīnberga had to submit several accounts of her journey to the authorities. After she was forced to leave her position as acting head of the Ethnography Department of the Historical Museum, she had to submit an explanation to the Ministry of State Control of the Latvian SSR as to why she did not hand over the collections of the department to her successor, according to the rules. Although Mērija Grīnberga was born in St Petersburg and her spoken Russian was good, her written Russian was a little clumsy, but the draft is written very expressively, and describes in detail the attitude of the museum administration towards the museum collections and her personally. The drafts of the accounts written by Mērija are also interesting because they show how she gradually adopted the ideological language of the Soviet regime. 

In 1970, when in New York graffiti just was being born, 18 years old Włodzmierz Fruczek made his first works on the walls of Warsaw. Fruczek was a beginning artist working as a decorator in the Fish Central Office. He regularly crossed the district of Warsaw after the war known as the Wild West, located partially on the ghetto area: ruined, filled with debris, rumored to be a dangerous site of criminality and black economy. The landscape of ruins and dead walls must have a strong impact on the young artist who without any project or idea in a few days painted a set of figures on the walls of the buildings of Żelazna, Grzybowska, and Waliców street. The paintings, made with emulsion paint, depicted outlines of human bodies, sometimes only torsos or limbs. Some of the figures stayed calmly, even holding hands but many of them were outstretched in extreme postures. The painting on the photo, made on the wall on Waliców 14, showed the scene of execution and as the only one of the set had a title: Dance of Death. It was a spontaneous, emotional reaction of the artist on the remains of war and Shoah that he was surrounded by.
Tomasz Sikorski took his picture about 1974. In his narrative, the Fruczek’s work is a symbolic beginning of the graffiti in Poland, independent from the American patterns of street art, artistically significant, and closely tied to the local history. For that reason, the photography of the Dance of Death opens the story about the post-war artistic graffiti in Poland.

Source:
Tomasz Sikorski, Marcin Rutkiewicz, Graffiti w Polsce 1940-2010, Carta Blanca, Warszawa 2011.