Crossing Borders 2 (Ukraine – Poland)

David Chichkan divided a rectangle, painted in watercolours on paper, with two straight lines, thus creating two vertical and two horizontal areas. The vertical line separates Ukraine from Poland, whereas the horizontal line demarcates the division based on social positions: traditionalism versus progressiveness. The rectangle is filled with portraits of anonymous persons. The silhouettes are further separated with meandering lines: the divisions into Left and Right, the radicals and the moderates. The composition is based on diagrams illustrating the results of political opinion polls conducted over the Internet, but it has some much older roots as well: it brings to mind ethnographic and anthropological atlases showing the areas occupied by various of nationalities, religions and cultures, which were published in great numbers when new statehood and selfhood identities were evolving in the first decades of the 20^th century.

Chichkan makes a somewhat ironical enquiry into the divisions within the societies of Poland and Ukraine. It is possible to define the views of each of the groups, but it requires great concentration and precision. Socio-political classifications seem to grow ever more fragmented, while the array of attitudes and views in both communities turns out to be essentially similar. He reveals the absurdity of not so much the divisions themselves, because those are ever-present, but of the modes of thinking that rely on divisions enforced by social realities and mutual connections.

Chichkan’s piece is one of those semantically universal works which acquire new meanings with the changes in political contexts. Thinking of the border between Poland and Ukraine, it is impossible to avoid geopolitical categories. Poland’s eastern border is also the eastern border of the Schengen Area and of the European Union, that is, a political and economic wall between the West and the East. It is an impermeable and frequently patrolled wall that makes the border very tangible. Its tangibility is experienced by every person moving from East to West. Migrants for economic reasons, who must be in possession of visas, permissions and insurances, are singularly aware of the feeling of crossing the border. The very moment of crossing it is fraught with stress and the sense of uncertainty and dependence on the will of others. Here, at the border – the actual one, the one with the barriers, customs officers and cramped waiting rooms for the travellers – the national, socio-political and economic divides are exceptionally distinct.

Izabela Kopania

translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz