Collection

Piotr Uklański (born 1968, Warsaw) has lived in New York since 1991, and is regarded as one of Poland’s most significant artists. His multimedia work mostly relies on visual games with symbols which, he maintains, have lost their significance in contemporary culture and become empty.

The title of the piece Deutsch–Polnische Freundschaft is a reference to the legendary German electropunk band DAF (Deutsch–Amerikanische Freundschaft). DAF were famous for using symbolic words like “Adolf” or “Mussolini” in the titles and lyrics of songs utterly unrelated to fascist themes or ideology. The words were used purely for their sounds, which cannot function culturally without evoking their historical context. Uklański works in a similar way, by consistently provoking his audience into training themselves to recognise the symbols of several cultural codes: politics, history, erotica, and entertainment (e.g. learning to deal with the Polish eagle being crossed with the Nazi emblem). Semiosis—the path a symbol follows in our consciousness before it acquires meaning—is a constant source of fascination for Uklański. It need not even be a visual symbol—the very sound of German had immediate connotations with war, Nazism, and violence for the Polish post-war popular culture in which the artist was raised.