There Is Only One Europe. In Conversation with Alicja Knast 

Piotr Policht

 

 

I will not ask how you convinced the competition committee to recognize and accept your program, but I will ask about your motivations, since in Poland it is still rare for a public cultural institution to be managed by a person from another country. Why did you decide to apply for the position of director at the National Gallery in Prague?

 

I had planned it beforehand – I knew that the competition would be announced and I was waiting, and so it happened that my time at the Silesian Museum in Katowice came to an unexpected end. 

 

We are now talking in a place from which we have a view of either Staroměstské náměstí, which has seen many historical events, or the Hussite church of St. Nicholas, so it is a space that is in a way a metaphor for what is happening in Europe. A few days ago I talked to the director of one of the largest European cultural institutions, from whom I heard that if a Polish woman is the director of the National Gallery in the Czech Republic, then Europe makes sense. With this in mind, I entered the competition. It is very important to me to get out of the vicious circle of division into the east and west of Europe, a separation I do not accept.   

 

I am from a generation that was traveling from Poznań to Berlin’s libraries. My friends there kept asking where I was going to sleep, to which I kept replying – nowhere, I’m going back to Poznań, because it is so close. The division between Eastern or Central Europe, as we like to call ourselves, and Western Europe has irritated me since the beginning of my professional career. Both in Poland and in the Czech Republic, we are notoriously comparing ourselves with the West, in every possible discipline. In fact, the only thing that separates us is finances. This does not mean that we should further strengthen this dividing mindset.        

 

However, finances can be a serious obstacle in networking art scenes in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. Such attempts, even in the form of residency programs such as East Art Mags, often turn out to be short-lived, eventually crashing against the financial wall. From the perspective of a critic, it is also easier to go to an exhibition in a museum in Berlin than in Ljubljana, because the chances are much higher that the first one will cover the travel costs. How can institutions in our region, despite these limitations, be part of this one, undivided Europe? 

 

Unfortunately, often these international projects are not part of a mid-term or long-term strategy. These are mainly bottom-up initiatives, very often financed by NGOs, and as a result they quickly burn out. As institutions, we cannot replace ministries, we have our own mission. In our case, it is taking care of the art collection from the territory of today’s Czech Republic and organizing exhibitions. International networking in our case takes a different form. I will give a specific example. Surrealism was and still is a very important trend in the Czech Republic and former Czechoslovakia. Its echoes are very visible in contemporary art today. Anna Pravdova, the curator of NGP, took care of Toyen’s output even under Jiří Fajt’s directorship. The gallery turned to the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, with which Annie Le Brun is associated, who knew Toyen during her lifetime, as well as to the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, where thanks to the curator Annabelle Görgen-Lammers, the third exhibition was organized there.

 

These curators prepared their own exhibitions of the same works that Anna Pravdová showed here, and thus they were three completely different exhibitions. From the point of view of impact and sustainability, we have created an ideal situation. In this case, cross-country networking is related to the “growth” of projects, not to moving the exhibition to an environment where all its aspects are not necessarily understood; now we are waiting for the Estonian edition. Estonian art historians point out the importance of surrealism in their region, it turns out that Czech surrealism in comparison with the Baltic one gives a further interesting perspective, which we did not think about before the Toyen exhibition.

 

In the case of a gallery like ours, we can build an international network only through specific projects around which we construct the program, while listening to critical voices about our ideas. When building the NGP strategy for 6 years, I put a lot of emphasis on saying that art is one, Europe is one. We are constantly crossing borders, trying not so much to ignore them as to eliminate those that are artificial and secondary.        

 

In this universal, European context, what is the question of the identity of the institution itself, whose core is the collection of art from the area of today’s Czech Republic? To what extent does the term “national” contained in the name of the institution define the gallerie’s program? 

 

“National” for me, a person who is not from here, means a community of all those who want to belong to it, who pay taxes here or expats. National means common, not nationalistic. Our collection has been growing since the end of the 18th century until now, so it reflects the history of this piece of Europe, the people who collected these works and the places where they were located. We are just opening the exhibition of Josef Mánes, one of the key figures in the visual arts who built the identity of today’s Czechs. Like every artist, he had an impact on the people around him and the visual space, he “sculpted” its perception with his works. But that doesn’t mean that we focus on national excursions in conversations with all five collection directors. We explore a certain cultural circle, we focus strongly on the reinterpretation of the canon.

 

In June last year, at the beginning of my stay here, a group of about thirty people came to the gallery to protest against the gallery’s strategy at that time. This was about a month after the post-pandemic opening. I don’t have the personality of a media animal, I’m not even particularly active in social media, I always try to put the institution in the foreground, not the director, but these artists protested de facto against me.

 

What did they disagree with? 

 

They wrote a proclamation that was supposed to be anti-system, they brought their works too – their objection was that one of the galleries was empty, and I was the one to find it. Such a space cannot be filled within six months, it is simply impossible. After two years and three months, we are still struggling with this, because in this part, which seems empty to everyone, we do not have the climatic conditions to exhibit works of art. We also want to fill this space with contemporary works based on new media, the exhibition must play a specific role in the dramaturgy of the exhibitions of the entire building. The protesters were surprised that I greeted them and wanted to talk, rather they expected me to hide. And as for the national issues – when I greeted them in English, one of the protesting artists asked why I don’t speak Czech. At that time, I didn’t know Czech yet, but I replied that we are in the European capital of culture and that’s why I spoke English.

 

Recordings from this protest circulated on the web, as a result, the wave of criticism finally fell on the protesters, there was talk of complexes that came to light. One of the politicians also happened to tweet that it was a scandal that the director of the National Gallery was a Pole. He got the answer that he would probably be very surprised to find out who the artistic director of the National Theater and the artistic director of the National Philharmonic were. A Norwegian and a Russian with an American passport. These disputes are a self-regulating organism, one doesn’t have to get involved in them.

 

Protests against directors have a long tradition in the case of the National Gallery. Milan Knížák was accused of turning the gallery into a private farm, while Jiří Fajt was accused of a program based on simple blockbusters and prohibitive ticket prices. How did you evaluate the activities of the National Gallery in recent years when you took up the position? 

 

Unlike Knížák, I am fortunately not an artist. I don’t know if it’s a good thing that I’m not an art historian like Fajt, but I think it’s a bit like a discussion about whether a doctor has to be the director of a hospital. I do not want to criticize the artistic decisions of my predecessors, and I did not follow their program closely enough to do so. I have my opinions on blockbusters, but I don’t criticize director Fajt for them, because I understand him – I know what his budget was and I can guess why he made such programming decisions. The worst thing in such a situation is the lack of stability in the institution. Good exhibitions take years to prepare. If the team does not feel that the project has a chance to be implemented, because it is not known what the preferences of a new director will look like, then these ideas do not leave the concept phase. No one likes working on projects to put them into a drawer. If I am the fourth principal in three years, the team is naturally confused. They don’t know what to do, where to invest the energy, devoid of motivation. So the constant changes in recent years have been the worst, and COVID has also done its job. 

 

Jiří Kotalík, director of the gallery from 1967 to 1990, was of course a member of the party, but he is very positively received. He took on various party demands, but the gallery had a European reputation at that time. Those who were very young curators at the time are now directors of the collection and recall that, paradoxically, it was a good time for the gallery. Probably the thing is that the institution needs an awful lot of commitment, one that is not possible if you want to additionally conduct your scientific activity and do other things. This role requires a lot of dedication, otherwise it just won’t work in this institution that has 6 buildings – almost all of which need renovation – and 5 collections. A sixth, architectural one is also being built.       

 

 

Is the architectural collection already part of your programme? 

 

It was mentioned before, but only recently was approved by the program board. I am fighting to find full-time resources for the director of the collection, despite my limited finances. It is a collection of several thousand objects, collected by Radomíra Sedláková, but we are only now cataloging it. It is terribly important for the whole of Central Europe, but to deal with it professionally, you need a competent architectural historian. 

 

What is the scope of the collection? 

 

Postwar. For now, the gallery presents a permanent architectural exhibition, prepared by Helena Huber-Doudova, who entitled it “Architektura všem”, meaning “architecture for everyone”. It focuses on the period from 1956 to the Velvet Revolution. Architecture holds a special place in the hearts of Czechs, especially brutalism. It is defended against potential infringement by many activists and art historians. 

 

The architects themselves are a highly respected community in the Czech Republic, and our collection was also created thanks to the fact that we managed to convince them to donate part of their archives to the gallery.

 

The earlier collection is partly at the National Technical Museum and partly at ČVUT, the Czech Technical University in Prague, where there is a department of architecture. There were plans to create a separate museum of architecture, but in fact it is too small of a country to build such an independent institution, so we will gladly take care of this collection. “Architektura všem” is a contribution to achieving this goal, telling a nuanced history of architecture after 1945, going beyond simple clichés, working-class housing estates and industrial architecture, showing the finesse and creativity of the architecture of that time.

 

I think that architecture must become part of the NGP program, it just fits perfectly here, also because this current architectural exhibition is located in the Targowy Palace, which is an architectural icon in itself. I am working on creating this branch, having its own team, its director, its own program of exhibitions and exhibition-related activities. Various entities, including municipal think tanks, deal with architecture here. Therefore, the discussion around architecture is lively, but what needs to be preserved and preserved for future generations simply requires museum quality care.       

 

Did the appreciation of Czech brutalism come after time, or did the wave of “decommunization” and demolition of socialist buildings never happen here? 

 

There were such cases, many of them, and it was on this basis of the protection of this heritage that many young people grew up with. Also, the conservation lobby is absolutely determined to preserve as much of the socialist modernist architecture as possible, and they seem to be more successful than in Poland. Also because this conservation lobby is stronger here than in any other country I’ve lived in. 

 

Is this due to the legal possibilities available to conservators? 

 

From tradition. It is important here to care for the past, to preserve its testimonies, and not necessarily to enter into a dialogue with it. Currently, there is a discussion about the Czech and Slovak pavilion in the Venetian Giardini, where the Biennale takes place. Two trends clash are in motion. First, a pragmatic one, assuming the creation of conditions for the presentation of works by contemporary artists worthy of the 21st century. Second, let’s call it conservational, that considers minimal interference and maintaining the building at its current condition. Certainly, this discussion with a Polish architect would look completely different, and I have experience of discussing with Polish architects, so I think I can form an objective opinion here. 

 

I wonder about your vision of the architectural department in terms of the exhibition structure itself, especially since you are a museologist with a musicological background, not a historical-artistic one, and you have previously worked on several specific exhibitions, from a collection of historical instruments to the so-called narrative museums. 

 

If you had asked me today how to organize the permanent exhibition of the Silesian Museum, it would of course look completely different. It’s partly a matter of the time we live in, but also partly a matter of maturity that a person acquires when it comes to what we can propose and what we really shouldn’t.

 

In other words, with less emphasis on multimedia and more on the object? 

 

No, what is more important is what we have the right to say, because we are terribly responsible for this narrative and the choice of content, shaping the interpretation of history. Especially when we talk about difficult, painful moments from the past. I don’t know if the solutions I participated in were created with full awareness of how much responsibility we take on ourselves, or how our story will resonate. I will never forget the situation in Katowice, when one of the visitors said that he did not agree with the way we described people assigned to the third category Volkslist. It is extremely important for the Silesians that they did not sign the volkslist, but regardless everyone had to fill in the questionnaires and on that note it was possible to be included in the volkslist by the occupation authorities. I do not remember the exact words that were used at the exhibition, but this person absolutely disagreed with the way information has been presented. The text was of course consulted with historians, who assured me that there were no misunderstandings in it. I asked the viewer who so sharply objected to the description, to formulate this own note in a way that seemed appropriate to him. I consulted this revised version with experts, who said that it would also be true in this new, edited form.

 

From this example, I learned that really every word matters a lot in narrative exhibitions where we present certain things as indisputable facts. But I don’t know what tools should be used to take into account the perception of various people coming to the museum, to take into account different perspectives and not falsify the past in the process. The older I get, the more experience I have, but therefore more and more questions that we did not ask ourselves when preparing these exhibitions, even though the exhibition at the Silesian Museum went through a rigorous review process, it was approved by several Silesian historians. However, I would highly advise any historian to immerse themselves in the visual arts and use this wonderful way of asking questions, which is working with artists. It’s much better than figuring out where to put a comma, where to put a period and how to phrase a given sentence.

 

Narrative exhibitions are therefore a very difficult tool, they must be used with a great sense of the subject, empathy and strict scientific rigor. The worst thing about them is the overuse of ex cathedra narrative, not multimedia. The fact that we overuse multimedia is a technical issue, resulting from the fact that new museum projects have been and still are overinvested in Poland. Poland benefited greatly from EU funds, therefore it had money for these exhibitions. Then the right companies appeared, the market appeared and regular financing from the state or voivodship budget appeared. Exhibitions in Polish narrative museums are on a completely different financial level than exhibitions in the Czech Republic. If we counted how much a square meter of an exhibition in the Czech Republic cost and how much an exhibition in Poland cost, the difference would be staggering.

 

The stream of EU money in Poland has also translated into the museum architecture itself. From the new building of the Silesian Museum, designed specifically for the museum function and this particular institution, located in the Culture Zone in Katowice, you ended up in a gallery scattered around the city, in a series of historical buildings to which you had to adapt. Now we are sitting in the 18th-century Kinski Palace, the other departments are located in, among others, in the Baroque Sternberg Palace, the Gothic monastery of St. Agnes or the rebuilt modernist Trade Fair Palace. These are all existing structures whose function was originally completely different. How does this affect the functioning of the institution?

 

The gallery suffers greatly from this, because we do not really have any space of European quality designed for the needs of the gallery, not a single square meter, everything is an adaptation of a historic monument. At the moment we are sitting in the place where Franz Kafka studied, it was then the building of the gymnasium. We can talk almost endlessly about what happened in a given building. The Market Palace burned down in the 1970s, and in the mid-1980s it looked like a ruin. At that time, it was decided that the only institution that could take care of the building was the National Gallery. Even before the revolution, it was renovated, but those were the years, as in Poland, when no one really cared about the quality of these works and even stealing materials from the construction site was a common practice. Due to the small height of the rooms, it will never be a really good exhibition space. In turn, the so-called Great Hall, which is adjacent to the building, is “our Turbine Hall”, where we can implement monumental projects, but we have nothing in between. In fact, apart from the building of the Waldstein riding school, which we rent, we do not have any good exhibition space.

 

Working with this tissue is very difficult and actually always delays us in preparing exhibitions. In fact, it was a terrible shift for me in comparison to Katowice, because architecture has a huge impact on the way an institution is managed. Plus, I got here in the middle of a pandemic, so with a team scattered on a daily basis, we couldn’t even organize a general meeting, we had to meet online. I think that I was hired also because of previous Polish experience with investments in museum infrastructure, which are also possible and planned here. Now we are finishing the design of the new warehouse space. My biggest dream, in turn, is to announce an architectural competition for the reconstruction of the Trade Fair Palace in this term of office. Then the organizational burden will be distributed in two places, one for the collection and the other for temporary exhibitions, which will facilitate our functioning. This kind of reorganization requires comprehensive thinking about institutions for which before, I believe, there was neither time nor money reserved from the state budget – we must remember that this is a small country, so budget planning is really meticulous and long-term. But unlike in Poland, what is planned is actually implemented.

 

Let’s go back to Poland for a moment. Your dismissal from Muzeum Śląskie ended in a settlement… 

 

…because I really wanted a settlement, because the museum as such, an institution created by people, has done me no harm. I was dismissed by the marshal of the province, so this decision was symbolically important to me. However, I won in all proceedings initiated against me. 

 

Your dismissal is part of a whole series of other decisions, politically motivated reshuffling of directors, but the current situation is the culmination of problems that have been going on for years – procedures have never been standardized, competitions are still not a golden standard. Is there a model in the Czech Republic that could be followed in Poland? 

 

This is a very difficult question, because there is a lot of neglect on both sides. In Poland, the method of appointing and dismissing directors of cultural institutions is regulated by the Act on Cultural Activity, but it is constantly overlooked. That was my case, the Supreme Administrative Court questioned the manner in which I was dismissed, so I could actually go back to work at the Silesian Museum if I wanted to. In the Czech Republic, however, there is no regulation at all. I can be dismissed overnight, no compensation, no more than two months’ pay, You can appoint and remove a director at any given moment, you might organize a competition, but you don’t have to. However, ministers take the opinion of the professional establishment very seriously.

 

The Art Director of the Museum of Decorative Arts, Helena Koenigsmarkova, has been managing it for 32 years. The director of the Rudolfinum has been in office for a slightly shorter period, similar to Michal Lukeš at the National Museum. When we met for the first time, they reminisced about how many ministers of culture have they survived. This is probably due to the fact that politicians in the Czech Republic are very well aware that museums, i.e. long-term institutions, need stability. We have seen in the example of the National Gallery that the lack of this stability leads to a complete disintegration of the institution. Probably in order not to cause confusion, the terms of office of several directors of the largest institutions have been simply extended for years. Of course, this can be interpreted well and badly, but every large institution needs stability, because changes cannot be revolutionary in these inert institutions. I think that the Czechs were terribly brave when they decided to hire me, although on the other hand, planning investments cannot be entrusted to a person without experience.

 

In Katowice, paradoxically, I was baptized after opening, when we had to diagnose all construction defects. We had to be ready for the worst scenarios, prepare crisis plans to be able to continue to run the institution safely. One year, during the July downpours, torrential rain fell and the entire museum was flooded. Water flowed into the ventilation system, and since the museum is underground, there was virtually no chance of the water not getting into the building. Thanks to the quick reaction of the team, practically nothing was damaged. Managing an institution therefore also means managing a crisis. In Katowice, I went through decent management and crisis training, also while being a part of events such as the Tauron Nowa Muzyka festival, in which the museum was strongly involved and had to prepare itself to receive a very large number of people. In the National Gallery, the problems are different, and the buildings are less complicated, only funds are needed for their revitalization.

 

You came to Prague at the height of one of the waves of the pandemic, now the gallery is functioning, at least from the viewer’s perspective, as before. Have successive lockdowns affected the way the institution operates and builds its program for the years to come? 

 

There was no profound change since visual arts require direct contact with the work of art. However, it was very moving when we saw that our online lectures “NGP On Air” reached people, that they were watched – we knew that people, for example, from Karlovy Vary would not come to us, but they took advantage of our remote offer. In the Czech Republic there is a strong division between Prague and the rest of the country. According to research, our audience is mainly women aged 24-45 living in Prague, which means that we do not reach where we would like to reach, that the adjective “national” is in a sense empty. But when we used tools other than exhibitions, we went online, we saw that the audience changed in terms of demographics and location.

 

Contact with the work of art is the most important thing for us and we know that it cannot be replaced by anything else. We returned to normal exhibitions because we love doing them, but on the other hand, we discovered that there are people out there who need us and the experience of working online made us more sensitive to their needs. The whole team is extremely involved and I am proud of my co-workers because they adapt to new conditions very quickly. This experience changed us as people. We are more aware that art and culture is a basic need without which it is impossible to live.