Krzywe Koło

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Central Archives of Modern Records.

The Warsaw Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party - Propaganda Department.

Krzywe Koło [Crooked Circle] Club: notes, activity profile.

Extract: The atmosphere in the room (sic!) is social and cafe-like during meetings. Everyone feels comfortable and people know each other very well. They are all united by the fact that they are an opposition club.

Elsewhere in the text: Most of them dress eccentrically. Some are young existentialists sporting a distinctive beard. The discussions are marked by an underlying venom when it comes to political, social, cultural and economic relations in our country.

And more: People use flowery language while making analogies and criticising our political system, they use allegories a lot. Debaters seem to be well prepared to tackle each topic, they quote monographs and other sources. The slightest attempt to oppose the majority is doomed to failure. The dissenter will be readily crushed by the other participants, who will be elaborate and eloquent, and reinforced by spicy jokes and remarks from the floor.

But: Some debates, especially on historical and economic topics tend to be calm, well informed and highly informative.

What can one imagine based on randomly preserved files, mainly state security agents’ reports, a handful of photographs (the exhibition is showing photos by Irena Jarosińska and Tadeusz Rolke), memories and mentions printed in larger studies, magazines, or still in handwritten notes in notebooks, or reading one furious monograph published just after the closing of the Club? Certainly, you can imagine the atmosphere of the Thursday gatherings in the approximately sixty-square-metre room on the first floor of the corner building in the Old Town Square in Warsaw, only recently reopened after reconstruction in 1953. And you can set this room in the frame of your understanding of the Polish October of 1956, when terror gave way to relative freedom (Poles call it a ‘thaw’), and group of people were sitting together discussing what could be done better, how socialism can be improved, people's lives made better, freedom of speech expanded and the challenges of the present identified.

The Crooked Circle Club was founded in 1955 as informal Thursday meetings of a group of intellectuals in a private flat in the Old Town. Relocated to the Staromiejski Dom Kultury (Old Town Community Centre, known at the time as the House of Clubs), it quickly grew adding new sections, including the most vibrant of them, the Visual Arts Section with its opinion-forming Gallery project. It gained popularity among Warsaw intellectual elites thanks to lectures by socially-oriented classical writers of the present-day humanities.

It closed in 1962. It was a splinter in the fingernail of the Communist Party, which apparently grew fed up with the fear of some 300 thinkers (for comparison: Poland’s population was 25,008 million in 1950, and the Communist Party had 1,377,000 members in 1957) would pierce the bubble of the self-imposed narrative of growth, prosperity and unquestionably correct party line, and possibly upset the political balance and scratch the image of Communist government.

The Crooked Circle exhibition does not reconstruct anything, although it does evoke the atmosphere of the place and the aesthetics of the period. The remnants of history in the collection, but above all the contemporary interpretations and inquiries of the artists and the accompanying programme only evoke the ghosts of the old disputes: what is humanism, being human, being an intellectual, being a public figure, and ask what - then and now - are the responsibilities associated with these functions.

Artists: Maja Demska, Kamil Pierwszy featuring Turnusik, Mikołaj Moskal, Noviki post studio, Ewa Polska, Łukasz Rusznica, Weronika Wysocka and archives relating to the Crooked Circle Club and Gallery

Curator: Ewa Tatar

Organisers:
Galeria Promocyjna
Staromiejski Dom Kultury

Co-organisers:
Archaeology of Photography Foundation
New Culture and Education Association

CHARTER Centre Foundation
ZAiKS
Regional Museum in Pleszew

Media patrons:
NN6T
Szum magazine

The project was realised within the framework of an arts scholarship of the City Centre of Warsaw.
Project co-financed by the City of Warsaw.
Exhibition organised as part of the 65th anniversary of the Staromiejski Dom Kultury gallery.