ABSTRACT
The chapter reflects on Anna Baumgart’s performative installation Sprawa kobieca w Polsce. Łódź 2018 (The Woman Question in Poland. Łódź 2018) staged in Łódź, Poland. This para-artistic work reimagines the 1989 Round Table talks in Poland precipitating the unravelling of the communist bloc and the country’s shift towards democracy. It addresses the inequality in women’s visibility and the absence and/or silencing of their voices in debates across socio-political infrastructures in Poland. Baumgart, via collaboration, creates a repository of micro-narratives to amplify women’s voices with/in her-stories. I argue she offers a performative and discursive space for persistence embodied with/in emergent and continuous activism grounded in politics of solidarity. Opening up a debate negotiating conditions of precarity and vulnerability, Baumgart recognises the assault on women’s rights in post-1989 Poland. Constructing liminal spaces for an agentic collective subject, she galvanises plural existence. My-her-our story is investigated via togetherness and feminist corporeal-materialism.
