UNPOLISHED was established in 2016 as a performance festival created by a group of Berlin-based-Polish-origin artists. It first went international (2017) and then planned also to go off limits (2020) but instead of such a leap, it hung in the air frozen as the whole world stopped. Since then, the festival has been on pause.

In attempts to bring the festival back from a forced suspension, what seemed more and more to bite us was as a POLISH in title itself. Once a funky game of word, in times of raising nationalism and after more than two years of pandemic, it felt as if belonging to, and complying with the old models of presenting artists of a country, one we so craved to leave behind entering the post-pandemic world.

Thus with this edition of UNPOLISHED that was conceived in dialogue of Joanna Leśnierowska and Peter Pleyer, we propose another opening of perspective. Let’s erase national, also from the inter-national calling for inter – or even trans-locality. Let’s not make Polish the only reference point of UNPOLISHED rather, let’s bring closer several Eastern Europe localities and look beyond them into what unites us in a shared experience and what have been and still are the strategies applied to deal with differences. And let’s question then if the shared experience has rather a regional or universal common taste?

Within the program of this year’s UNPOLISHED that serves at the same time as coda to the project Terrestial Transit by cranky bodies a/company, we decided to share works by mature although struggling with wider recognition female artists from Budapest, Erfurt, and Warsaw. We wish to discuss both their local living and working environments as well as to question what it means to be a female artists in the places and contexts they come from. How much did it – or did not – change over decades of several political transformations and artistic generations?
If we scratch the polished layer … , what unpolished gems and surfaces do we find underneath?

UNPOLISHED is a co-production of DOCK ART, Muzeum Susch and the Art Stations Foundation CH, funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
Curated by Joanna Leśnierowska and Peter Pleyer.

detailed program HERE