The Anatomy of Blasphemy: Passion and the Trial of Dorota Nieznalska

On 27 July 2005 in Gdańsk, a large town in northern Poland, there was yet another courtroom showdown of a case that had been dragging on for over three years and has received much Polish media attention. The trial's subject was Dorota Nieznalska and her gallery installation, Pasja (Passion), exhibited in 2001 in Wyspa Gallery (wyspa translates as "island"), located within the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts.¹ The legal dispute over Passion has revolved around a paragraph, § 196 k.k. (Legal Codex), in the Polish legislature, a 1997 legal provision against publicly "offending someone's religious feelings," of which offense is punishable by up to two years in prison. At each hearing, upon entering the courtroom Nieznalska has been greeted by fervent believers from the League of Polish Families with large crosses and rosaries in their hands, chanting religious songs and shouting curses at her, a scene reminiscent of a medieval witch burning. This surreal, carnivalesque atmosphere prompted one journalist to call the proceedings "Circus in the Courtroom" (Romanowski 2005:1.3).² On 18 July 2003, the judge sentenced Nieznalska to six months in prison for "offending the religious feelings" of the League of Polish Families' members. The sentence was changed to six months of "unpaid penal labor" (Zaremba 2003:104).³ Nieznalska filed an appeal and the case continues, with the same circus/witch hunt scene replayed at each hearing.

Wyspa is famous for breaking various Polish taboos, and the exhibition of Passion was no exception. The installation consists of a large iron Greek cross hanging from the ceiling, with a photo of male genitalia attached to the cross at its very center, and a large projection with a close-up of a male face convulsed in strenuous exercise set behind the cross. The work was meant to be a commentary on the relationship between masochism and masculinity, but it was the combination of male genitals with the cross that became the object of contention and of the legal battle. Seen in the context of Nieznalska's previous works,⁴Passion continues the artist's lifelong interest in straddling the thin line between masculinity, violence, and the discourse of the sacred in Catholic-dominated Poland. In the context of works by other contemporary Polish artists—such as Alicja Żebrowska's 1994 video Grzech Pierworodny (Original Sin), a take on the 1993 abortion ban⁵; Zofia Kulik's series Bro Symboliczna IV (Symbolic Weapon IV; 1997) of male nudes framed by various political and religious symbols of power and domination; Katarzyna Kozyra's Łaźnia Męska (Men's Bath House; 1999) a short video filmed in a Budapest men's bath house, that offers take on Ingres's The Turkish Bath (1862); and Kozyra's photograph Więzy Krwi (Blood Ties), a 1995 work commenting on the Yugoslavian conflict and depicting two sisters' mutilated bodies lying under religious symbols of Catholicism and Islam; or even Zbigniew Libera's video Jak tresuje si dziewczynki (How to Train Little Girls; 1987) and sculpture Uniwersalna wyci garka penisa (Universal Penis Expander; 1994), a "device for penis elongation" that attempts to deconstruct religiously structured gender roles while mocking the Polish patriarchal culture—Passion should still appear to fit into the general discourse on the sacred and profane that is currently taking place in contemporary Polish art. But perhaps it is because no other current work has made such a direct connection between male sexuality, religious discourse, and religiously sponsored gender difference, that Passion arouses such heated debate.

Figure 1.

Dorota Nieznalska, Pasja (Passion), 2001. Installation view. (Photo by Wojciech Nieznalski; courtesy of Dorota Nieznalska)

Since 1989, the year that officially marked the end of the communist era, Poland has become a battlefield between religious and liberal fanatics; a country in transition between communist rule, during which the Catholic Church (with the Polish former Pope John Paul II as its spiritual and political leader) played a leading role as the nation's moral consciousness and political force, and a burgeoning capitalist society, in which Catholicism...