The Polish Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale features an impressive exhibit by Sharon Lockhart, centering around Janusz Korczak’s “Little Review”.
Visit the Exhibit to enjoy five issues of the English translation of “Little Review” every week until the Biennale closes at the end of November.
Wall credits from the entrance to the Polish Pavilion:
Sharon Lockhart
Little Review
Sharon Lockhart (b. 1964) is an American artist living and working in Los Angeles and Poland. Lockhart works with communities to make films and photographs that are both visually compelling and socially engaged through collaborations that unfold over long periods of time. Created with young women from the Youth Sociotherapy Center in Rudzienko, Poland, her project Little Review comprises translations, a new film and series of photographs, as well as educational workshops. Little Review draws its inspiration from the work of Janusz Korczak (1878-1942), the Polish-Jewish educator, orphanage-director, and children’s rights advocate. Similar to Korczak, Lockhart’s goal is to provide a forum for children’s voices — both past and present.
The eponymous Little Review (Mały Przegląd) was a newspaper written by children and teenagers and published as a weekly supplement to the Jewish daily Our Review (Nasz Przegląd) from 1926 to 1939. Created and originally edited by Korczak, the Little Review gave voice to young people’s opinions on politics and everyday life.
The new photographs in the exhibition — introspective and careful studies — portray two young women from Rudzienko reading the Little Review in the National Library in Warsaw, where the newspaper has been conserved. Framing an encounter across nearly a hundred years of history, the photographs reflect on the gaps, linkages, and subtexts between past and present.
From the archive of 677 issues, the young women chose twenty-nine issues of the Little Review based in part on connections with their own lives and parallels to today’s uncertain times. Their selections from the paper, which remains untranslated and largely unknown, are presented here for the first time in English on a weekly basis for the duration of the Biennale.
Accompanying the texts, a new film by Lockhart suggests a more abstract translation of the Little Review: three acts and a satirical prologue performed by the young women that evoke the resilient and candid spirit of Korczak’s newspaper. Set against a black background that refuses a single context, the scenes are resonant of the history of a diverse group of practices in both the visual and performing arts. Given this space to be seen and heard, the young women, like Korczak’s writers, command performances full of nuance and self-possession.
Since 2014, Lockhart has been conducting workshops with the young women of Rudzienko. Throughout the Biennale, Lockhart and the Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw will continue to organize educational workshops for the young women aimed at empowering their sense of agency, freedom, creativity and modeling possibilities for longer-term support structures with Warsaw institutions.
At the heart of this multilayered project are the subtle and myriad ways in which individual lives and their sociopolitical realities are brought together through an intermingling of past and present. The installation furnished with architectural elements adapted from the National Library in Warsaw, gives palpable form to this density of histories and lives. A collective portrait that focuses, in the here and now, a nearly hundred-year-old call for an empathetic community that cares for every voice.
Participants of the Little Review project include the young women aged fourteen to eighteen from the Youth Sociotherapy Center in Rudzienko:
Weronika Banach, Elżbieta Bugajewska, Agnieszka Chodakowska, Beata Domańska, Patrycja Dominiczak, Zuzanna Dziembakowska, Nadzieja Flinik, Patrycja Głogowska, Aleksandra Grabowska, Zofia Grzywacz, Agnieszka Jamiołkowska, Małgorzata Kowalska, Aleksandra Kowynia, Wiktoria Kruszewska, Natalia Leśniewska, Natalia Mikołajczyk, Alekandra Mojsiejew, Maja Nowakowska, Adrianna Olczak, Patrycja Onochowska, Alicja Pałaszewska, Alicja Pasternak, Angelika Piekacz, Natalia Skoroch, Paulina Suchocka, Karolina Szyc, Natalia Tetych, Wiktoria Tomaszewska, Aleksandra Wiśniewska, Kinga Woźniesińska, Gabriela Zadrożna, Karolina Zembrzuska.
Exhibition Curator: Barbara Piwowarska
Polish Pavilion Commissioner: Hanna Wróblewska
Deputy Commissioner: Joanna Waśko
Organizer: Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, Warsaw
Polish participation in the 57th International Art Exhibition in Venice was made possible with the generous support from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.
Cooperation: City of Warsaw, Adam Mickiewicz Institute
Little Review was realized in collaboration with Youth Center for Socio-Therapy in Rudzienko, National Library of Poland, Korczakianum Center for Documentation and Research (Museum of Warsaw), POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
and Lockhart Studio
EXHIBITION:
Architecture: EscherGunewardena Architecture
Audio-visual: Eidotech Polska
Construction: Andrzej Bialik with Grzegorz Ostromecki, Paweł Ostromecki, Sebastian Staroń
Furniture (benches and the clock): National Library in Warsaw
WORKSHOPS:
Coordination: Aleksandra Knychalska with Michał Grzegorzek
Dance: Marta Ziółek with Agnieszka Kryst and Katarzyna Sikora
Editing: Ula Jabłońska
Mindfulness: Małgorzata Wiśniewska
Piano: Izabela Smelczyńska
Culinary: Mahmoud Rai
Feminism: Joanna Ostrowska
Graphic Arts: Radek Nowik, Lukasz Szymański
Janusz Korczak Research: Marta Ciesielska, Agnieszka Witkowska-Krych, Wojciech Lasota
Meditation: Elżbieta and Michał Kabała
Movement: Magdalena Marcinkowska
Painting: Natan Kryszk
Photography: Michał Tyburski
Teen Addiction Anonymous: Anonymous
Writing: Gunia Nowik, Patrick Komorowski, Paulina Reiter
Vocal: Edyta Jarząb, Maria Kozłowska
Epistolary Translator: Martyna Gart
Workshops for the girls from Rudzienko are organized by Zachęta — National Gallery of Art throughout 2017 are coordinated by Zachęta’s Education Department (Zofia Dubowska, Karolina Iwańczyk). They are made in collaboration with Lockhart Studio; the Theatre Educators Association, Warsaw; the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Służew Cultural Center, Warsaw; History Meeting House, Warsaw, and others. Special program financed by the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts.
LITTLE REVIEW PUBLICATION:
Coordination: Dorota Karaszewska
Copy Editor: Paulina Bożek
Graphic Design: Błażej Pindor
Substantive Editing: Agnieszka Witkowska-Krych
Translations: Paulina Bożek, Marek Jeżowski, Taida Meredith, Elżbieta Petrajtis-O’Neill, Grzegorz Nowak
Contributing Editor: A.E. Benenson
FILM:
Production: Wojtek Markowski, Aleksandra Knychalska
Assistant Director: Alex Slade
Camera: Volker Gläser
Choreography: Marta Ziółek
Piano: Izabela Smelczyńska
Sound: Radosław Ochnio
and
Editor and Post Production Supervisor: May Rigler
Re-recording Mixer: Aidan Reynolds\
SPECIAL THANKS:
Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and neugerriemschneider, Berlin
- Neimeth / Lockhart Studio, Los Angeles
Gunia Nowik / Lockhart Studio, Warsaw
Mark Bradford, The Broad Foundation, Regina Chung, Sebastian Cichocki, Agnieszka Dwernicka, Sabine Eckmann, Kevin Eichorst, Piotr Florczyk, Fundacja Galerii Foksal, Barbara Gladstone, Jenny Jaskey and the Artist’s Institute, Maria Konarowska, Aleksandra Kujawa-Eberharter, Agnieszka Kurant, Silvie Liska, Caroline Luce, Dylan Lustrin, Tomasz Makowski, Joanna Manecka, Magdalena Marcinkowska, Mariusz Maruda, Zofia Moruś, Tim Neuger, Jane Neidhardt, Karolina Ochab, Paulina Ołowska, Joanna Pawluśkiewicz, Bartosz Przybył-Ołowski, Brian Pete, Agnieszka Pindera, Katarzyna Piskorz, Jenelle Porter, Conny Purtill, Burkhard Riemschneider, Leon Rigler, Katy Siegel, Ewa Tatar, Karol Thiel, Maria Toboła, Ayano Tsuchiya, Vidhi Todi, Agata Wejchert-Dworniak, Karolina Zajączkowska