{"id":2029,"date":"2023-09-22T16:56:56","date_gmt":"2023-09-22T14:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kinoteatrbluboks.com\/?post_type=portfolio&p=2029"},"modified":"2023-12-11T22:20:15","modified_gmt":"2023-12-11T21:20:15","slug":"mural-for-franka-2","status":"publish","type":"portfolio","link":"https:\/\/www.kinoteatrbluboks.com\/index.php\/en\/portfolio\/mural-for-franka-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Devoted Dresses: to Franka & Margret"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https:\/\/youtu.be\/xYrlGolu058?si=Sj7LZDwZII1r0q6S”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

\nDevoted Dresses: to Franka & Margret<\/p>\n

Olga Wolniak \u2013 painter:<\/p>\n

\nWe\u2019re looking for Franka in Pola and Pola in Franka.
\nWe\u2019re looking for the image of a beautiful young woman,
\none of many who were wiped out.
\nOur souvenir portrait of Franka, the sister of the dancer Pola Nire\u0144ska,
\nis the portrait of a phantom haunting the present through things past.
\nThe Franka\u2019s Mural projection was based on intuition and conjecture.
\nIt is made of after-effects of faces, eyes, a nose, mouth, gazes, and sighs.\n<\/p>\n

\n1;35 \u2013 4;24
\nW.K. So that no trace was left. The trace just evaporates. There\u2019s no trace of Franka, or her
\nprewar life. It\u2019s tied to the fact that the whole ghetto was burned down, with all its documents, all
\nits photographs. All of it burned. That\u2019s terribly important to me as well. It makes Franka a kind
\nof symbol of the Holocaust. Of condemning people to non-existence.
\nI\u2019d like to see her face. Her smile. To be able to imagine her.
\nIt is painful to me that I cannot imagine her. The contour of her her face, her profile.
\nSome kind of trace. But I have no real traces of Franka.
\nO.W.: And that husband of hers?
\nW.K.: Her husband was a well-known face in prewar Warsaw.
\nHe was the head of the distribution company of a big American production house and gave
\ninterviews to the press about film productions.
\nThere\u2019s a key in the family story. And in the family, Franka was most important. Pola herself said
\nso on many occasions. We also know more from Karski\u2019s report. But Pola\u2019s as well,
\nbecause I found three interviews with Pola, where she recalls Franka.
\nFranka was her elder sister. Pola was the youngest, and her darling sister protected her from
\ntheir parents in childhood when Pola was naughty. They were very close.
\nIt is incredible that when Karski spoke of Pola\u2019s family he only spoke of one person \u2013 Franka.
\nHe never even mentioned that she had a brother and a sister. Pola as well, out of all her family
\ncorrespondence held onto only one card, sent in 1939 to Franka. A card that was sent back.
\nThat was her only document from her family.\n<\/p>\n

\n4;24- 5;24
\nThe issue of her presence, tangibility, and trace is also tied to Franka. The story of Franka is
\ncentral to Pola and to this book. Because this is a book about the Holocaust and for a long time
\nI tried to find a trace of Pola\u2019s beloved sister, whose existence I knew through only a few
\nsentences I found somewhere. I really searched a lot of archives. It seemed impossible there
\nwas no trace, but I found no trace of that Franka.
\nIt was only then I realized this was the essence of the Holocaust. That the Holocaust was
\norganized, conceived, so that no trace of those people was left. The fact no lists were made
\nwhen they were deported…
\n6;20 \u2013 12;20
\nO.W.: Incredible. Weronika, this is Pola\u2019s dress, but tell me
\nwhat years it dates back to, when she used to wear it.
\nW.K.: That\u2019s a dress from the last years of her life.
\nFrom the last days, in fact.
\nThat is, she was wearing it a few days before her suicide.
\nShe went to see her friends in that dress when she felt lost
\nafter quarreling with Karski and was looking for shelter.
\nShe came in that dress, and the next day, leaving their home,
\nleft the dress behind. A few days later she committed suicide.
\nAnd her friend held onto the dress.\n<\/p>\n

\nO.W.: You got it from that friend. Right?
\nW.K.: Right. From that friend, who didn\u2019t want to see me for years,
\nbecause Pola\u2019s death was a major tragedy for her and I suppose she was afraid to talk about it.
\nIn the end I managed to talk her into meeting and during a long conversation she suddenly
\npulled it from her wardrobe and said: Take it.
\nO.W.: No wonder. I would have wanted to give it away as well.
\nAnd you were the best person.
\nW.K. It was important to her. After that conversation she believed the book would get written.
\nI do really think she felt a kind of relief giving me that dress. She actually gave it to me with the
\nstories. She told me a great deal about Pola, because they were quite close for many years.
\nShe\u2019s a very sensitive person. Her name is Nancy Schandelmeier. Today she\u2019s getting up there;
\nshe\u2019s well over eighty, though a good twenty years younger than Pola.
\nIt was only when she talked about Pola that Pola really came to life for me.
\nPola killed herself in 1992. She was eighty-two years old. I never met anyone who knew Pola
\nwhen she was young. That meant I only knew the young Pola from written accounts, from letter
\nand articles about her. I never really felt her presence. When I met Nancy, that was when I felt
\nPola\u2019s presence, because Nancy knew how to talk about her in a vivid and tactile way.
\nHow Pola was followed by a trail of perfume when she entered the room. How Pola moved,
\nthe gestures she made, were written in Nancy\u2019s body.
\nShe showed me Pola\u2019s gestures. I always tie how Nancy made Pola present with that dress.
\nThat is Pola\u2019s presence. As I was writing the book, I hung up that dress right next to the board
\nwhere I\u2019d sketched out her family, some photos. I looked at it often. I also had a problem
\ngrasping Pola. That\u2019s one topic of the book, that she had this fluid identity, both national and sexual.
\nHer personality as an artist was also in flux…
\nBecause her biography was, to a large degree, buried, cooked up.
\nIt is no accident there was so little information about Pola. Firstly, the fact that she was
\nhomosexual was carefully hidden, first by her, and then, I think, by Karski.
\nSecondly, everything concerning Pola\u2019s family completely vanished. That must have been her
\ndecision. I don\u2019t know. That family investigation was so important to me, it was key,
\nbecause I knew that Nire\u0144ska had war trauma, though she was not a victim, in the sense that she was far
\naway, she was in England throughout the war. When I speak about her death,
\nin the way I wrote, it was very important to me not to assume why she killed herself.
\nI think it wouldn\u2019t have been right. You never know. There are always so many reasons.
\nI think one of them may have been her sense she was losing her mind, as they say, after having lost her body.
\nAnd it seemed to her she was losing her mind, because after her incautious transaction Karski
\ntook away her credit card and that made a conflict between them. That was a few days before
\nshe died. It goes together with the story of that dress, because she went in that dress to see her
\nfriends and then left it with a woman close to her. Maybe she took something in exchange,
\nI don\u2019t know, I didn\u2019t ask.<\/p>\n

\n12;21 \u2013 16;24
\nO.W.: We\u2019re talking about Franka, but we\u2019re speaking about Pola\u2019s dress, right?
\nThe first time I saw it, that color struck me; it\u2019s called caput mortuum.
\nNeither purple nor brown. You might call it organic, gray-blue, gray-violet.
\nW.K.: Why do you suppose it\u2019s called that?
\nO.W.: That\u2019s a long story. Caput mortuum is a name that comes from alchemy.
\nIt means \u201cworthless remains,\u201d the moment the soul passes into an ethereal state and those
\nsoulless remnants at the bottom of the test tube were mixed with various binders, which made
\nthat color. Its other name is \u201cmummy brown.\u201d
\nIn times past, caput mortuum was made of ash, or human or animal remains.
\nW.K.: It was burned?
\nO.W.: Yes, it was burned, and those remains, that ash, was mixed with oil and turpentine to
\nmake this pigment. After the eighteenth century synthetic ingredients were most often used,
\nand a variety of iron ore, known as \u201chematite\u201d (blood red).
\nIt\u2019s a very sophisticated blue-gray, but also highly organic.
\nIt\u2019s a very refined color, yet sad. Depressing is more like it.\n<\/p>\n

\nW.K.: Because she suffered from depression.
\nO.W.: Exactly. You\u2019re dressed in yellow. That\u2019s a color that overpowers you.
\nI\u2019m dressed in black. But that color would make us both invisible.
\nW.K.: The cut of that dress also hides the shape of the body, doesn\u2019t it? Pola had a marvelous
\nfigure. She was shapely right up until she succumbed to depression. And she fell into a very
\nheavy depression at around fifty, then she stopped dancing. And when she stopped dancing,
\nshe stopped teaching, because Karski asked her to. She didn\u2019t dance for ten years and was
\nhorribly depressed those ten years, with many suicide attempts. She recovered when she
\nstarted dancing again. For those ten years her figure went to seed.
\nShe gained weight, of course, but she also developed arthritis. After that, she stopped dancing.
\nShe worked on choreography sitting in a chair. It was very hard for her to move at all. Although
\napparently she still had beautiful hand gestures. After that depression she dressed in baggy clothing.<\/p>\n

\nKatarzyna Wi\u0144ska: oral history archive and video
\nOlga Wolniak: Mural for Franka
\nWeronika Kostyrko and Olga Wolniak: recorded conversation
\nJolanta Krukowska : performance in Pola’s dress photographed by
\nPiotr Jaxa: in homage to Halina Hulanicka –
\nJolanta Krukowska’s and Pola Nire\u0144ska’s dance teacher.
\nPola’s dress lent by Weronika Kostyrko
\nTomek Gajewski: editor
\nSpace: Muzeum Woli 2023<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https:\/\/youtu.be\/xYrlGolu058?si=Sj7LZDwZII1r0q6S”][vc_column_text] Devoted Dresses: to Franka & Margret Olga Wolniak \u2013 painter: We\u2019re looking for Franka in Pola and Pola in Franka. We\u2019re looking for the image of a beautiful young woman, one of many who were wiped out. Our souvenir portrait of Franka, the sister of the dancer Pola Nire\u0144ska, is the portrait of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2030,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"portfolio_category":[],"portfolio_tag":[],"class_list":["post-2029","portfolio","type-portfolio","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kinoteatrbluboks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/portfolio\/2029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kinoteatrbluboks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/portfolio"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kinoteatrbluboks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/portfolio"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kinoteatrbluboks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kinoteatrbluboks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2029"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.kinoteatrbluboks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/portfolio\/2029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2065,"href":"https:\/\/www.kinoteatrbluboks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/portfolio\/2029\/revisions\/2065"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kinoteatrbluboks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kinoteatrbluboks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"portfolio_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kinoteatrbluboks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/portfolio_category?post=2029"},{"taxonomy":"portfolio_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kinoteatrbluboks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/portfolio_tag?post=2029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}