ROMUALD DEMIDENKO & MAJA ∀. NGOM

UNDER THE SURFACE OF WORDS

ROMUALD DEMIDENKO:

It seems as though the wave of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests in North America and many European countries has quickly paved a way to speak about racism again. In some UK or Belgian cities, monuments of colonial leaders were removed from their pedestals or their names were erased from the public space. In Poland, on the other hand, at least for a moment, there was a debate on language or more precisely a conversation on our collective pre-assumptions and bias towards people of colour or those whose skin colour demands a change of language appropriate to our current times. And it was those people who were finally given a voice to speak about their experience and to comment on what is ‘acceptable’. I wonder what was your observation of these ongoing discussions, what in your view have they yielded, and what do you think is still to be done in this matter?

MAJA ∀. NGOM:

Observing all these discussions through my perspective definitely had a multilayered character, because I was looking at it through the prism of being a Black Polish woman who lives in London. Additionally, the pandemic sweeping the globe and Brexit contributed to my great anxiety and even more personal reception of all these events. Institutional racism in the United States flowing in waves of various forms of oppression against African-Americans is just a piece of the proof that the passage of time both personally and collectively is not enough to fix catastrophes—to use the words of British artist Hannah Black here. I remember when a decade ago I visited the exhibition ‘Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America’ at the Autograph Gallery in London where they showed a multitude of postcards that were very popular in the U.S. in the 1900s, on which mutilated inert bodies of African Americans hung surrounded by a smiling white crowd eagerly posing for a photo. Such cards were customarily sent to each other among white population with good wishes and greetings. The last documented lynching in the United States took place in 1981—only 40 years ago. If we assume that it is possible to force a change in any social behaviour by imposing changes in legal norms, then I believe that the acceptability of this aggression remains still engraved in the deeper structure of the collective fabric of a given society. The news of the unjustified abuse of force and deaths of black Americans at the hands of police are reaching out to Europe since several decades each time being presented as an individual precedent, to which the reaction is often: disbelief and shock. 

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However, it seems to me that most of the black diaspora in the world has no illusions that racism still exists, simply taking some other forms such as again an institutional route or nano-racism; and that it is strongly tied to a Eurocentric view of the world. The timing of the explosion, especially in the United States, was in my opinion inevitable and it will continue until some real changes will take place. Although neither the experience of slavery nor institutional racism is something which I can identify with in the context of upbringing in Poland, my interest in the subject of racial identity has started with learning about United States. My MA thesis, written in the Faculty of Modern Languages in Poznan, concerned the American literature created during the Harlem Renaissance taking place in New York in the 1920s. It was a very interesting moment in the history that of emergence of black identity and consciousness, hence its name, no longer used today, The New Negro Movement. This period of extremely vibrant musical, artistic, and especially literary creativity—with writers such as W.E.B DuBois, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston—had a profound and formative impact on a later discussions of black consciousness and subjectivity, and future analyses of its experience. The direct legacy of the Harlem Renaissance includes Pan-Africanism, the Cuban Negrismo, and the Francophone Négritude movement of the 1930s, and of course Frantz Fanon’s writing. You can recognise its echoes in such authors as James Baldwin, Wole Soyinka or Chinua Achebe.

ROMUALD DEMIDENKO:

And how shall we relate this to a geographically closer to us European context?

MAJA ∀. NGOM:

My point of observation has been London, where I have lived and worked for over 10 years. I am aware of the racial and class inequalities that intermingle here, despite the English political politeness. The high-profile Windrush scandal involving a generation of Caribbean immigrants has not been addressed properly to this day, despite having ruined the lives of many people through wrongful deportations, detentions, and denial of citizenship rights. The Grenfell Tower block fire occurred just a few years ago in Chelsea, one of the city’s wealthiest boroughs. It claimed the lives of at least 80 people from various ethnic minorities and it took place despite complaints about the building’s safety from residents themselves. 

When I first arrived in London from Poland I moved into Brixton, a neighbourhood which has a majority of Caribbean and African descent communities, and my skin colour definitely allowed me to blend in. However, when I started attending university I was suddenly one of the only few black people once again. Being the only one black person at university in Poland was probably directly proportional to the overall number of black people in the country in the 1990s; whereas in England in 2008 it seemed quite odd. It was clear to me that art-related educational institutions as well as art institutions themselves not only did not reflect English demographics, but quite possibly were not interested in the voice of minorities. A few years ago, walking into the most public as well as commercial galleries in London, one was under the impression that there were only a few black artists in the whole of England, and that they are rather an exception in the white horizon of the art world. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in the States, the complicity of the British empire in the slave trade, where the wealth and fame of many historical figures was built on oppression during imperial and colonial times, and the fact that the very foundations of the state institutions associated with the arts and culture are built on exploitation and inequality, have also begun to be heard. And this is where the perplexing question always arises: how to read the works of morally ambiguous artists and individuals—should we burn their works, forget and erase them from the history, or perhaps we should always add an information about the hidden context of their activities and lives by including commentary that incorporates the history of those victimised by them?

ROMUALD DEMIDENKO:

I would like to bring up the language issue again, can you say the last months changed it in some way or is there a chance that something will change in the near future? I found it startling, that people who should have been directly involved in the discussion, were “allowed” to enter at such a late stage, instead of linguists. In other words they have lived in Poland for a long time, if not from birth, so who, if not themselves, has the greatest right to claim their subjectivity and be called exactly the way they wished? 

MAJA ∀. NGOM:

The discussion around the language used towards black people in Poland that took place recently had the most personal dimension for me. It is interesting because it started with the demonstration in front of the U.S. Embassy in connection with George Floyd’s death. The poster carried by a little black girl, Bianca Nwolisa, said: ‘Don’t call me Murzyn!’, which historically was a sort of nickname for people of colour and has become an equivalent for something exotic, if not basically pejorative, and only recently its use has become debatable. Well, I thought: “Finally!”, but my enthusiasm and feeling of empowerment faded a bit when I read the chauvinist-racist comments boiling under Rafal Milach’s photo showing Bianca. Of course, I am glad that there are voices of support and at least attempts to understand or listen to others in Poland. To me the fact that there are currently more black people there and that we share similar problems and experiences is extremely encouraging and it definitely brings a sense of community although, unfortunately, it is built mostly on negative experiences that we have been subjected to. But you know, growing up in the 1990s, I had to work out for myself a system to deal with my visibility and singularity, without support and without widely accessible knowledge such as literature or the Internet. I think there was a lot of solitude and silence in my upbringing because there wasn’t anyone with whom I could share how I feel. When it comes to the issue of language and the terms we use for any non-white people in Poland, this is probably an interesting idea for an art project in collaboration with linguists and the people involved, but I think the attempt to establish terminology seems misguided in its universalistic assumption that all black people in Poland are connected by their skin colour—when in fact, what we have in common is being and growing up in a homogeneously white society. Skin colour is “signified” and seen only by being pointed out by the white majority, and it becomes the bond for our identity. Since there has been no collective black identity in Poland so far, there is also no established language to describe it. Developing terms is an extremely difficult task, especially given the constant semantic transformations of language, fluidity of identity itself and generational differences. 

ROMUALD DEMIDENKO:

We would certainly have a richer terminology in relation to the non—white newcomers – in Polish there’s a very common surname Nowak and Jana Shostak, Warsaw—based Belarusian—born artist, uses word Nowaks to address anyone coming from another country and settling in Poland – if the discussion about racist vocabulary in the local culture had been undertaken much earlier and the social context, as I assume, was more diverse. Since the language we wish could apply to address different skin tones is only being born, maybe at least it would be possible to identify words not to use?

MAJA ∀. NGOM:

I think that the negative connotation of the term Murzyn has already been significantly clarified. The term has been commonly used for example in literature published in Poland to describe Afro-Americans or in anthropological texts—I don’t really mind it being there. I think it has a sort of neutral meaning that reflects the time it was used. But times change and as you said before some things acceptable in the past are not nowadays and language should reflect. There is no doubt that the negativity of this word is absolutely indisputable in the insistent forms of racism when someone shouts it at you to insult you, ridicule you, or make you feel humiliated. There is also the commonly used word mulatto, which is an interesting phenomenon in Polish. It was used in the description of the Portuguese and Spanish caste system in the 18th century, in which each person coming from a mixed racial union (between white, Indian, and black) had a specific name under which his/her deviation from the white racial purity was defined. I mean the tables illustrating this system have about 16 different names and are very meticulous in naming each individual accordingly. The word mulatto probably comes from the Latin mūlus—mule, which sound similar in both Portuguese and Spanish: mula. As you know a mule is an animal that is a cross between a horse and a donkey and referring to the 18th century zoological aspect of the word, it is a crossing of species which should not have taken place as a violation of the law of nature, and which according to scientist was evidenced by the fact that mules are in most cases sterile. In Poland, paradoxically, one gets the impression that the word is used often to indicate a positive trait, and almost an alleviation of difference on the basis of proximity to whiteness: “But you are not black you’re a mulatto!” Personally, I would prefer to see this word disappear from use.

In Britain, language changes are much more dynamic, I believe it is due to the large population of Black people from all over the world, and also a sense of community. Terms commonly used in England just a few decades ago like coloured, half-caste are now, rightly so, considered offensive. More contemporary terms like mixed-race, PoC (People of Colour), BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) or BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) are linguistic constructs primarily with an administrative function, and therefore are widely criticised as terms that are created to stand in opposition to white identity but where you throw everything non-white together and where blackness is diffused into being Asian and other shades of blackness. Besides, the phenomenon of whitening blackness to its acceptable shade, i.e. colourism and favouring people with skin colour lighter than black, reveals the participation of “innocent” and “objective” sciences in constructing a system based on exclusion and their effort to make the antithesis of white-human versus black-not-human present. I wanted to add, regarding the Black Lives Matter demonstration, that once again I was struck by the marginalisation and less media coverage of the suffering of black women in the U.S., because let’s not forget that they are also victims of violence just like men, and yet their names are almost unheard, especially in the media or on social platforms. Time moves far too slowly when it comes to changes in gender inequality and discrimination and it is incredible to think that more than half a century later Malcolm X’s words are still very relevant: “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.”

ROMUALD DEMIDENKO:

In the installation entitled The Sweet Taste of Otherness you include different elements: the walls are lit with negatives in light boxes, the floor is covered with asphalt felt, and the smell of chocolate is in the air. In the middle of the room, in ceramic pots with anthropomorphic reliefs, there are plants whose common names suggest foreign origin or unusual features, such as Wandering Jew or Black Magic, but also to address foreignness. You refer to personal experiences of upbringing in a homogeneous society, confronting a language that turned out to be about exoticisation. How would you like the visitors to read your work?

MAJA ∀. NGOM:

My installation is about the intersectionality of the representations that are present with my skin colour in Poland but also in other countries, and which mutate within historical discourse combining blackness and femininity. I was wondering what the reception of this work in my home country would be. I do realise that most viewers in Poland are white and that it is possible that issues and stories of race are not something they can identify with. I think many conversations about race in Poland come down to the conclusion that without having any colonial involvement, Poland must be immediately free from racism. 

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I wanted to build a place where the viewer would not feel completely comfortable. And so, the space is seductive and inviting, yet it is also uncomfortable and claustrophobic, somewhat irritating. The smell of chocolate diffused in the space becomes nauseating; beads made of my mangled hair hang as spectrum of my body. The monotonous sound of theta waves is interrupted by shouted racial insults such as: “murzyn”, “bambus” (bamboo), “negatyw” (negative). The space is made of objects whose names in Polish language are also often used as racial slurs. I am also winking at the viewer by allowing the pornography of looking, when he watches me and the actress Sylwia Achu on the screen: two black girls eating chocolate and embracing each other in a caring gesture. I allow the viewer to look at me—the other, knowing that I am being seen, it is a bit of a game: “I can see you looking at me.” But maybe I should ask you, how did you feel in that space? 

This experience of being described as half-and-half is interesting in that it accumulates additional sediment of representations and adds new meanings. On the one hand, in racial terms, the idea of being half-and-half means that one is also devoid of being fully one or the other. The term mixed-race which is coined on this concept is also full of contradictions that say a great deal about the very concept of race, its formation, and how it is perceived. I have found that often this difficulty in description causes quite absurd situations. There was a time when I travelled a lot to Africa—I mean, everyone in Poland always claimed I was from there so I thought: “I will go to this big home and see!” But seriously, when I went to Tanzania, in one of the towns some boys started following my friend and I, and called us “Mzungu!”, which in Kiswahili means a white person. At one point I turned around furious, shouting in Kiswahili “Stop calling me white, my father is from Senegal. I am one of you!” The boys looked at me puzzled and then the oldest faced the rest of them and said: “White says she is black!”. They were indeed right in their perspective: having been raised in Poland in the midst of a white society, in a white family, with almost no continuity with my father’s heritage, I’m quite white. For me as an artist, the fact of being seen as an in-between, as an ambiguous person, is very important and often drives my work. It also makes me listen carefully to what others say, what do they really say or mean when they say something like, for example: “To me you are not black.” Often you have to decipher meanings hidden under the surface of words.

ROMUALD DEMIDENKO:

One rarely has the feeling of being the addressee of an artist’s work, which made Sweet Taste of Otherness so special, because I felt like I was the recipient of this installation and I knew that it was also supposed to sting me. In your installation, you disassemble codes and myths around “otherness” fixed in Polish language. It is also accompanied by a text with a very specific visual reference. I wanted to ask what it meant for you to look at this collection of museum items you were photographing. I am talking here about huge megaliths from Senegal which in the 1960s found their way to the Paris Museum of Art of Africa and Oceania, later renamed the Musée du quai Branly.

MAJA ∀. NGOM:

The essay you mention here was written two years ago and got published in the Obieg quarterly for an issue titled “Dis—Othering”. It became the first part of the body of work titled The Sweet Taste of Otherness. The second part was a performative reading of a fragment of the text at the Recovery exhibition at Chalton Gallery in London. During the reading I served the audience with home made Polish baked goods, which names use racial denotations such as a “Negro cake” referencing the so-called “Murzynek” (diminution for “murzyn”), or “Mulatto tits” (Cycki mulatki) and “Mulatto tears liqueur” (Łzy mulatki).

The third part is an installation made for last year’s Biennale Zielona Góra. My interest in the megalith described in the essay and depicted in the photographs has its origins in 2014, when I was on a residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. At the time, I was thinking about creating a work that would reflect my unique relationship to Senegal, my father’s homeland—a land of my unknown heritage that is written on my body. I had read that the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, among the vast number of objects exported, or rather looted, during the colonisation of Oceania, America, and Africa had also some objects from the region of Senegal. The huge laterite megalith came to the collection in the 1960s as a part of the French-Senegalese artwork exchange.

ROMUALD DEMIDENKO:

What is the function of text in your work? 

MAJA ∀. NGOM:

The text, the activity of writing has become an organic part of my work and practice. I am interested in the fragmentary nature of text, it is breaking under the pressure of words that often emerge on their own. I use the word narrative in the sense of a voice that guides a fragment of a text, but in fact I am fascinated by the anti-narrative model of writing its folds layered under the pressure of images, objects, and facts. Often, the text becomes invisible in the final phase of the work. Photography and text both have a strong potential to create images, they can either complement or exclude each other, and I guess this paradoxical sameness is what attracts me. The text is indeed an attempt to dismantle codes and myths, but it also emphasises them by poetically combining several layers of narration— autofiction, factual material, and fantasy, united by the voice of the narrator’s Self. The superficial separateness of these fragmented voices is compacted in displacement; in the space stretched between the two corporealities—that of my father and mine. The photographed megalith that accompanies the text has a symbolic role, it is a monument marking a burial place and it is also transcendent in its impenetrability. Seeing it for the first time in the museum, I had an impression of immense emptiness—I was expecting an object that would speak to me or explain my heritage. I was not prepared for silence. But I instinctively felt that it was this stone [Fr. pierre] that would lead me in search of my father [Fr. père].

It was during this residency that I have realised that there are some untold stories in Poland that are relevant to my experience. My African-American friend who is a violoncellist asked me about a Polish black violinist born in the 18th century in Biała Podlaska whose name was George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower. I have never heard that name before. Then I discovered that Bridgetower’s father was probably a slave purchased in London by Hieronim Florian Radziwiłł and later served at the court of Hungarian Prince Nicholas Esterházy of Galántha. There are several references to Bridgetower’s acquaintance with Beethoven. It initially resulted in a friendship and a piece dedicated by Beethoven to the violinist entitled Sonata Mulattica. Unfortunately, a later dispute between the two brought Bridgetower’s musical career to a halt and the piece was retitled to Kreutzer Sonata. Today hardly anyone has heard of this black violinist, who came from Poland. Perhaps with his skin colour and origins he rips the category of Polishness too hard to be mentioned in the history books. Knowing about his existence was very revealing to me. One day I would love to look for traces of black Polish women in the past history of Poland—peasants, Sarmatians, servants, or whatever their role would be. Perhaps I would have to reimagine it myself in a future work.

ROMUALD DEMIDENKO:

You studied ethnolinguistics and cultural studies, and then photography. You often work in cycles. In one of them, entitled Salpêtrière, you use the archival set of photos of female patients of a Parisian hospital for people suffering from epilepsy and hysteria, treated as living illustrations of the disease, but also instrumentalized in the process of a photographic experimentation.

MAJA ∀. NGOM:

Salpêtrière is a series of seven black-and-white photographs: appropriated portraits of female patients from the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris and landscape photographs taken along the Thames river at low tide. The series is from 2012, at which time I was interested not only in the indexical character of photography—that is its disposition to make visible the traces of what was right in front of the camera, but also I was experimenting with the materiality of photographs—hence my interference into the chemical process in the darkroom. La Pitié-Salpêtrière was a 19th century hospital where several hundred women were detained due to their behaviour perceived as not conforming to societal norms of the time (for instance, prostitution, alcoholism, begging, or any neurological disorder they may present); and were diagnosed with hysteria. At that time, this institution was taken over by the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, famous for conducting his Tuesday medical classes during which the hysterical attacks of his female patients were presented and analysed in front of numerous medical authorities and the public. 

Charcot is still considered the founder of modern neurology for his contribution to the systematisation of neurological examinations. One of his trainees was Sigmund Freud himself, who used the aforementioned lectures on hysteria to lay the foundations of psychoanalysis. In the history of the hospital la Pitié-Salpêtrière, there were particularly three threads that intrigued me: the intense manly desire to locate and describe hysteria, as a form of anomaly occurring in the female body—the involvement of photography in the performance of hysteria, and its complex entanglement in the creation and power of the gaze. The hysteria attack occurring in the female patient was caused by the triggering of the flash light and then photographed. Collaborating with Dr Charcot and participating in the performance was seen as a privilege and any unwillingness to cooperate would be punished with solitary confinement or starvation. Despite the popularity of some of the female patients such as Louise Augustine Gleizes and Marie Wittman, the ethical dimension of Charcot’s practice remains undefendable today. What we see in the series is a mix of four very bright, barely visible and underexposed prints of archival portraits taken during performances of hysteria, and three solarised prints (exposed with a flash light during the development process before moving to stop bath) of black and grey landscapes with a veil like fabric draping on a riverbank. I wanted to emphasise the anonymity of these women and take away the possibility of seeing them clearly.

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The landscape of the river and water as feminine elements and the weight of the blackness of the veil were a metaphor of female consciousness imprinted in the history of La Pitié-Salpêtrière. During the show, the photographs were accompanied by dark echoing sound designed by artist Sebastian Bartz with a female voice guiding us through her journey of immersion and slow sinking. In the context of my current body of work The Sweet Taste of Otherness, I find very relevant the research of historian Sander Gilman. He demonstrates that it was in the nineteenth century that the iconography of the black Hotentot Venus was fused with the iconography of a prostitute, prevailing in contemporary representations of black women as promiscuous, aggressive and animal-like “sexually uninhibited” until today. 

ROMUALD DEMIDENKO:

You seem to be watching “others”. Like, for example, in the Encrusted Island photo series where you place your grandparents. Am I guessing right?

MAJA ∀. NGOM:

I feel that even when looking at others I always end up looking at myself through them. My Encrusted Island: All That They Hide from Themselves is also a series of black and white photographs: portraits of my grandparents embracing various tree parts from a nearby forest, and still life photographs showing these roots and trunks in their home bedroom.

Among these photographs, there is also one print toned brown in coffee grounds. I spent my upbringing mostly with my grandparents, who took care of me after my mother left for Italy. At that time, we moved to the countryside where everyone treated me as my grandparent’s daughter rather than their grandchild, this shift was quite a strange situation. Anyway, my grandparents are very close to me, the bond that exists between us is very strong, but it is also the effect of a rupture caused by the trauma of losing or lacking my parents. The title of this work is taken from a book by Hélène Cixous titled Eve Escapes. It is a story about a daughter and her mother and their knotty relationship (from love to hate) in which, due to dementia, the roles of caring have been swapped. It also speaks of how it feels to experience the process of ageing of the ones whom we love and about the difficulty of letting them go. Cixous is a remarkable French writer and philosopher associated with second-wave feminism who uses a variety of poetic and literary stylistics and illogical modes of speech in reference to her experience of growing up in Algeria and her family mythologies. Her earlier book The Newly Born Woman had, in fact, an important influence on the Salpêtrière series that you asked me about earlier. Cixous indicated that there is a continuity in representation of medieval witches and the hysterical patients of the Salpêtrière due to the role imposed on them by society. Both witches and hysterics both were subjected to annihilation—by burning or isolation, and both were forced to participate in a spectacle for male gaze.

ROMUALD DEMIDENKO:

You live in London, where you studied and currently work. Undoubtedly, it is a place where the “taste of otherness” seems to fit into the landscape of the city. What is the current discussion about the subjectivity of black people or people of colour in the art field?

MAJA ∀. NGOM:

In England, the multiformity of black voices is enormous. Their pluralism and diversity is fascinating with many lively debates over language and the fervor and faith with which, especially the younger generations, are developing strategies to retell the past but also to create their future. I must admit, however, that my Polish origins do not always allow me a full identification with the history and experiences of black people in the UK. For example, social class and race are very interrelated in the UK, which is not the case in Poland. Being in the UK made me realise that my view on history and Europe is definitely rooted in my Eastern location and the experience of communism. 

It would seem that the taste for otherness in London is different from the one that I am familiar with in the social landscape in Poland, but as I mentioned earlier, during my studies at the Royal College of Art I was one of the few black people in the academic year. We are talking about the university that has about 400 students on the course. Also, in England this burden of otherness has definitely shifted on my Polish background. Nowadays, bored with explaining my origins, I invent alternative personalities. I guess today, most institutions of art and culture in the world, stimulated by widespread criticism, are trying to include at least one artist of BAME origin. Thus, the question asked due to exclusion: “Is it because I'm black?” may seem relevant, but this time as of being included into the mainstream. Unfortunately, I am aware of the practices of symbolic efforts aiming to present multiculturalism and diversity. These are problems that many black theorists had warned us about, for example bell hooks in the essay Eating the Other. Sometimes, the inclusion of black people into the mainstream culture or art institutions and galleries is not about real change, distributing resources, or giving platforms to be heard, but about tokenism and ticking the right boxes. Additionally, there are also expectations, which is perhaps not talked about very often, about subject matter and aesthetics of black artists. They should deal with issues of race, show something exotic or something other, or exotic. I suppose it is good to be conscious of all of these determinants, however this should not stop me or other artists who speak from the position of minority to take advantage of every opportunity to present their work. 

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ROMUALD DEMIDENKO:

On the other hand, Brexit, as one can guess, changes the perspective for many people who choose to settle in the largest cities of Great Britain. 

MAJA ∀. NGOM:

Because of the pandemic, Brexit became a secondary issue in the UK, but I have no doubt that right now Europe seems a lot further away from England. And I don’t really think anyone fully knows what the real consequences of leaving the European Union will be for people, particularly for the artists. We have no clue yet what changes take place in our lives as a result of this, but I think we will experience them unexpectedly and painfully quite soon. I see a lot of Europeans leaving the country. My disposition to catastrophic thinking combined with pessimism makes me believe that unemployment will rise, that cultural exchange with many European countries will stagnate due to huge bureaucracy. There probably will be an economic crisis, which will minimise already trimmed down funds for the art sector. 

The consequences, as always, will be most severe for the poorest and therefore most vulnerable parts of society, including working class artists. Of course, the Polish passport allows me to move freely between Europe and the UK but there are many who cannot afford such freedom of movement, for example my partner. Most of my friends, both English and foreign, are still shocked by the referendum result and have many concerns. Unfortunately, as we cannot alter the past, it is better to focus on that which can still be changed—the future.

Maja ∀. Ngom is a Polish-Senegalese artist whose multidisciplinary work includes photography, installation, video, text and sculpture. She is a graduate of the Photography at Royal College of Art in London (2015) and Modern Languages at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (2005). Ngom's body of work explores issues of identity in the context of belonging and displacement. She draws on feminist literature and phenomenological thought. Her unique experience of coming from an intergenerational and multi-ethnic family contributes to her work with fragmented narratives, often taking forms of autobiographical fiction with fluid identities and fantastic events.

Romuald Demidenko is a curator and art historian. He currently serves as one of curators at Rupert—centre for art, residencies and education in Vilnius, Lithuania. He completed the Curatorial Studies programme at KASK School of Arts in Ghent, Belgium and obtained his MA in Art History at the University of Wrocław, Poland.

This interview appears also in Polish (www.nn6t.pl).
Extended acknowledgements to Bogna Świątkowska