Despite the challenges of transporting art across ideological blocs in Europe during the Cold War, Polish art was exhibited comparatively often in Sweden. This also meant challenging the prevailing notion that aesthetic influence supposedly went from West to East. While museums, municipal art galleries and artists challenged this enduring bias, it remains a relatively unknown aspect of this significant period in the history of contemporary Swedish exhibitions. In an attempt to shed light on this period, this article examines the case of the Polish artist Władysław Hasior (1928–1999) within the context of the Swedish art scene between 1968 and 1989. Hasior exhibited several times in Sweden, and many artists testify to being influenced by his art. He opened up doors to Polish highland folklore and, for art critics, he epitomised Polish art in general. His exhibitions were also used by Swedish art institutions to build bridges in times of ideological and social division. These findings nuance the image of a divided Europe and deepen our understanding of the relations between nations, showing that the West-centric power relations of post-war modernism do not straightforwardly apply.

This article examines what role Sweden, as a presumed periphery in Northeastern Europe, played at the turn of the 1960s when Magdalena Abakanowicz and her fellow Polish artists working in fibre material broke new ground moving away from traditional tapestry by working with complex three-dimensional forms. Using the method of a history of crossing, histoire croisée, the article shows how exhibitions with Abakanowicz’s fibre art served many interests at the time, the artist’s own creative development and international career, Swedish art institutions eager to display current experimentsin soft environments, the burgeoning Swedish cultural policy making, and larger structures of cultural diplomacy. The article thus proposes to understand the relation between Sweden and Poland as two semi-peripheries, where the dominant narrative of modern art stemming from Western centres influencing the rest was, in many ways, circumvented. 

The subject of this dissertation is the art of the Polish theatre director, set designer, and visual artist Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990) and its inherent width of artistic expressions. The aim is to contribute with new interpretations that add to previous research that primarily has studied the body of work from the perspectives of the artist’s intention and biography, and divided his artistic work between visual art and theatre. 

By using perspectives from theories of performativity, the starting-point for the study is that artworks interplay with a presumed spectator, contribute to the interpretation, and continue to produce new meaning beyond the original context. The study sets out to answer how the interaction between artwork and spectator can be understood, and what effects the artworks have on each other, when being analysed together, mediated by public presentations. Two exhibitions, one anthology, and a group of artworks from the respective presentations, are being analysed. 

The first analysis explores the solo exhibition Tadeusz Kantor, emballage at Kulturhuset, Stockholm, 1975–76. Questions regarding representation, materiality, and conceptual modes are discussed in relation to a presumed spectator. In the following analysis, the anthology Tadeusz Kantor: Ein Reisender – seine Texte und Manifeste, published by Verlag für moderne Kunst & Institut für moderne Kunst, 1988, is analysed. In this chapter issues related to verbal and visual expressions are being discussed in relation to the motif of the book, that is identified as the literary narrator. In the last analysis, the retrospective exhibition Tadeusz Kantor at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, 2008, is explored. The chapter deals with issues related to spatial, material, and temporal aspects, connecting to a theoretical discussion on the live event of performance and theatre and their subsequent reproductions.      

The dissertation demonstrates how questions of media and materiality can deepen the way we understand the oeuvre of an artist that actively shaped the reception of his work with contextual references and themes. The chosen perspective and method take the artworks in a relatively unexplored direction, showing how public appearances can be considered as events of becoming.