A new exhibition opened today, Thursday April 3rd, claiming to expose the myth of the “colonial innocence” of Poland and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Whitewashing (Wybielanie) at the State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw takes a self-critical look at (i.e., it attacks) the Museum’s past by confronting its “colonial patterns”—an “important task of an institution located in a country that tried to realize its colonial ambitions, while being the subject of internal European colonization.”
Curated by Witek Orski and Magdalena Wróblewska, this show alleges that Polish travellers, researchers, and journalists in Africa “reproduced the colonial gaze” in the jargon, while aiming to create a Central African Polish colony—a goal largely blocked by Germany at the time. Nevertheless, Polish guilt seems to be shaping this exhibition as part of a wider war on the past, rather than just letting the collection speak to the visitor.
Whitewashing runs until August 31st, 2025.
