Elementy. Sztuka i Dizajn no. 12/2027
Another’s Gaze: Decolonising Imagination

Elementy. Sztuka i Dizajn, a science and arts journal published by the Wydawnictwo ASP in Kraków, invites submissions for its twelfth issue. The editor for this issue is Anna Batko.

Decolonising the gaze involves taking a critical approach to the ways in which we construct images of the world, other cultures and ourselves. It applies to more than the history of colonial empires, also embracing entrenched hierarchies of knowledge and representation which determine who is entitled to look, recount and assign meanings. It is an attempt to identify ‘another’s gaze:’ inherited visual schemas which tends to remain invisible while continuingly affecting our understanding of art, nature, heritage and history.

In the Polish context, decolonising imagination raises questions about the culture of a country with no official colonies but even so entertaining colonial ideas. It is related to the ways in which Poland assimilated and processed colonial categories for describing the world as well as how its own experience of being subjugated was entangled with the creation of hierarchies for others. It exposes to view postcolonial traces found in culture as well as internal dominance relations, including class, racial, ethnic and cultural hierarchies.

The heritage of subjugated groups, including peasants, ethnic minorities and other excluded groups the histories of which remained outside the mainstream narration for long, constitute a special area of this reflection. Decolonising imagination stands not only for recovering forgotten stories, but also challenging the ways in which they used to be represented: romanticised, exoticised, folklorised or reduced to an object of observation. In this sense, decolonisation is not only about historical colonialism, but about the process of critical emancipation of imagination from established structures.

Within this context, the ambivalent role played by modern art and the avant-garde in the discovering and assimilating of the art known as “primitive” is not without significance. The Dadaists and Surrealists turned to the arts from Africa, Oceania and non-European cultures, considering them to be an alternative to the academic rules of European art and a source from which to obtain new ways of thinking about form, body and imagination. The encounter with those objects led to a radical transformation of the language of European avant-garde, from Cubism to Surrealism. At the same time, this fascination was necessarily entangled in colonial hierarchies of knowledge and seeing. Taken out of their own social, religious and political context, such art pieces were often treated as anonymous universal sources of inspiration while their creators remained invisible. The category of “primitivism” was far from being a neutral description but a construct of European modernity that used the idea of “the Other” to define itself. The avant-garde discovery of non-European and folk art constituted both the expansion of the field of art and an act of appropriation. It was a way of transforming somebody else’s cultural forms into a tool of one’s own artistic revolution. Contemporary reflection with its critical approach to the legacy of the avant-garde makes this double dimension plain enough: the emancipatory force of its quest, but also the colonial mechanisms which made it possible for modern European art to develop its identity through the relation to what it saw as “primeval.”

In this sense, contemporary art has become a platform for rewriting archives and reclaiming gaze. It is possible to uncover hidden power relations recorded in the material world by exploring landscapes, plants, objects, museum collections and images from folk culture. Decolonising the gaze is more than simply a critique of the past, it is also an attempt at creating other ways of seeing, polyphonic, aware of their own conditioning and open to the experiences of the subordinated. Art today is trying to work with invisible archives: the memory of serfdom, the histories of migration and the colonial traces recorded in landscape. The objective, however, is not to come up with a new canon to replace the old one, but to change the way we look without recreating the logic of domination.

Within the context of these problems we suggest the following questions to be discusses:

• Can imagination be decolonised? How to free ourselves from inherited ways of looking that determine our understanding of culture, nature and the Other?

• Who is looking, and who is looked at? What power relations are hidden in the acts of recounting, collecting and representing?

• How long can one look through another’s eyes? How do colonial and class hierarchies continue to shape our ideas of subjugated cultures?

• Can a country with no colonies of its own still have a colonial imagination? How did Poland assimilate colonial categories, aesthetics and ways of classifying the world?

• What is borrowed colonialism? What are the ways in which colonial models of representation, hierarchies and ways of seeing have been taken over by a culture located beyond the centre of global empires?

• What are the invisible sources of Polish and European modernity? What histories, people and experiences have been deleted from official narratives? What would the history of modern art be like if its relations with colonialism were taken into account?

• Who discovered non-European and folk art and who was it discovered for? Was the “discovery” of the Other a way of constructing one’s own modernity?

• What was the role of the avant-garde’s fascination with the art of Africa, Oceania and non-European cultures? Was the interest in the “primitive” an attempt at an emancipatory transgression of the European perspective, or a form of aesthetic appropriation?

• What would the history of Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism be like without the encounter with African art? What does European avant-garde owe to colonialism and imperialism?

• Was the concept of “primitivism” a neutral description or a tool of establishing hierarchies between cultures?

• Who discovered folk art and who was it discovered for? What are the two souls of a folk artist?

• What is self-folklorisation? Can the subordinated unconsciously reproduce images of themselves created by dominant groups?

• Do the so-called folk turn and peasant heritage provide space for a recovery of class subjectivity or do they continue to be an aesthetic image created for others?

• What can art do to reveal invisible histories of serfdom, exclusion and class violence?

• Can landscape be an archive of colonial history? How are traces of violence, labour and global interdependencies stored in the earth, plants and natural resources?

• What do such plants as cotton, coffee, tobacco or eucalyptus communicate about colonial relationships? How are their histories connected with economy, work and transformation of landscapes?

• How do images of the Others come to be? How have art, anthropology, museum and popular culture created ideas of blackness, Romaniness, folkness and exoticness?

• Can the museum be decolonised? How to change institutions which have organised knowledge by collecting and classifying the Others for decades?

• Who has the right to the archive? Who decides which histories deserve to be preserved?

• How to create archives of the subjugated without recreating the old mechanisms of representation?

• Can art become a tool for recovering the memory of those who have been looked at with another’s gaze for centuries?

• Is it possible to reclaim the gaze without recreating the logic of dominance?

We expect articles written from many perspectives, not exclusively that of art history or aesthetic but also other research disciplines within broadly understood humanities and social sciences.

We expect articles written from many perspectives, not exclusively that of art history or aesthetic but also other research disciplines within broadly understood humanities and social sciences.

Guidelines for submissions:

• Abstract deadline: 1 September 2026 (title + abstract: 1,500–2,000 characters)
• Submission deadline (upon acceptance): 30 November 2026
  Length: 20,000–35,000 characters (including footnotes and bibliography)
  Peer review: All submitted articles are subject to double-blind reviews
  Honorarium: 200 € for accepted article
  Please send proposals to elementy@asp.krakow.pl

Editorial Team