The Political Economy of Showing: Exhibiting Poland Abroad between the Late 1940s and 1970s
dr Katarzyna Jeżowska, The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney
International exhibitions and trade fairs have often been described as “a world in miniature.” In the aftermath of the war, as the borders were redrawn, populations “exchanged”, and new international alliances formed, exhibitions were not merely projects of representation but of worldmaking. In this talk, I will examine exhibitions as sites where Polish bureaucracy mobilized design to build relationships with the world and materialize socialist promises at home, while simultaneously revealing competing visions of what modern Poland could afford to be.
Katarzyna Jeżowska is a cultural historian of Eastern Europe. Her research focuses on the exchanges between Eastern Europe and the world and the design cultures of state socialism. Her first book, "Socialist by Design: The Politics of Material Culture in Cold War Poland," is forthcoming with Cornell UP. She is a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. In 2026, she is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo. In 2023, she was the Wayne Vucinich Fellow at Stanford University. Between 2024 and 2026, she served on the board of the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture.
Image: Polish exhibition at the International Trade Fair in Casablanca, 1956. Courtesy of the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw.
Date: 23 April 2026
Time: 18:00 CET
Format: Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/8483078653?pwd=PCaRmb7pMb9yXup7fCu7ezRtoHxKeF…
The seminar Art after 1945: New Research, New Methodologies forms part of the research activities of the Department of 20th and 21st-Century Visual Art Documentation at the Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, and is led by Dr Karolina Łabowicz-Dymanus.