ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I argue that decolonization should make whiteness “strange” as Richard Dyer suggests. I do so by exploring the works of two artists of Polish descent who mobilize racial signifiers in their artistic practices: Jacek J. Kolasiński and Radek Szlaga. I focus primarily on Kolasiński’s Creole Archive (2015–present), composed of 3D-printed objects and a growing number of “archival artefacts,” and to a lesser degree Szlaga’s 2015 solo exhibition in Warsaw, Poland. Kolasiński’s work explores the connections between the doleful Black Madonna of Częstochowa and the Haitian Vodou spirit Ezili. The Madonna is thought to have been brought to Haiti by Poles in the early nineteenth century. His investigation of the Madonna is an organic non-linear – indeed creolizing – unfurling of his exploration of his transnational genealogy that resulted in the materialization of Polish identity as connected to North America (the United States and the Caribbean) and parts of Africa.
