12. In the sixteenth century, Lublin was a hub of anti-war and anti-feudal religious group Socinians who – exiled to Transylvania and the Netherlands – influenced the political philosophy of John Locke. In the Renaissance, this city attracted dissenters; in modernism: the avant-garde; and in the 1970s and 80s: conceptual artists and alternative theatre. Today it boasts young artists: Robert Kusmirowski (featured in the recent Liverpool Biennial), Urszula Pieregonczuk (who queers Dostoevsky and war history) Mariusz Tarkawian (whose drawings will be on show at the Glasgow School of Art Mackintosh Museum in January: ) and Piotr Brozek who has authored the FB profile of a Jewish child murdered in the Holocaust, Henio Zytomirski. Brozek updated the profile with newsfeeds in the first-person, using the present tense. Invitations to add Henio as a friend read: “I would like to tell you the story of one life.” Internet users befriended Henio, and sent him messages, comments and even gifts. Mariusz Tarkawian drew a monumental panorama of bloodshed throughout human history in Lublin’s Biala Gallery. The Holocaust was presented, as was the Armenian genocide (the artist’s ancestors were Armenian, who had for centuries been living in Poland). Tarkawian also graffitied a house with the lyrics to a Yiddish song in order to commemorate Jewish Lublin. Such artistic-social initiatives are necessary in Poland, where mourning  for the victims of the Holocaust is lacking. Unmourned millions, unmourned life.

13. In a book Jewish Lublin: A Cultural Monograph, published by the Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre and the Centre for Jewish Studies, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, the Jewish Mexican sociologist Adina Cimet writes, “What had been home became hell and much was severed: lives, culture, faith, hope, and humanity. The Majdanek extermination camp, just a bus ride away from the city, remains one of the tombstones of that destruction.”

Author of educational projects at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York Adina Cimet adds on Lublin,

“I encountered young people that were struggling with the past they had inherited: the city they were left with and the silence they were handed. These young pioneers – as I see them – were working to imagine the obliterated past; they struggled to conceive and recognize the Jewish contribution to their history in order to be able to understand ‘their’ past. Some ached from the slaughter that was staged in those streets. But their work revealed to me that, out of that past, they sought to imagine a future for themselves. They dreamt of rebuilding their world based on values of decency, respect to others, and the recognition of Jewish memory.”

14. Among these pioneers are the Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre and the Centre for Jewish Studies, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University as well as NGOs: Homo Faber and The Well of Memory (Studnia pamieci). Intercultural Lublin is presented in and fostered by the photo campaign Open-create Lublin! O-tworz Lublin!, initiated by Barbara Wybacz. The tradition of this Jewish city is researched into by Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Robert Kuwalek and Dariusz Libionka whose car was sprayed with swastikas .

15. We need even more grassroots art activism and opposition to the wave of ultra-nationalism which has gripped Hungary, Russia and Poland. Contemporary art is repressed here, as it explores the traumas of the past and of the present (Pussy Riot, layoffs of curators, Orban’s takeover of art institutions). East European societies are polarized economically and politically:  the moneyed few vs. precariousness of the transition; far-right militias on the rampage vs. socially engaged (Marcusian-Kristevan-Rancierian, albeit always local!) aesthetics .

16. Lublin itself has also been home to groundbreaking thinkers: the philosophers of science Emile Meyerson and Ludwik Fleck, the specialist on Bergson, Romuald Jakub Weksler Waszkinel, who serving as a Catholic priest discovered that he was Jewish (a Holocaust survivor who had been handed over to a Polish family by his mother). This city is exceptional through outstanding women and LGBT personalities: the lesbian writer Narcyza Zmichowska (whose Gothic novel The Heathen Woman was translated into English by Ursula Phillips), The Bund leader Bela Shapira, the novelist Malwina Meyerson and her daughter poetess Franciszka Arnsztajnowa whose friendship with this city’s avant-garde gay poet Jozef Czechowicz is depicted by Hanna Krall in her reportages. The Grodzka City Centre-NN Theatre is presenting Czechowicz’s photographs of Jewish Lublin, as well as the life and work of Krystyna Modrzewska, a transgender Jewish doctor, scientist and writer, forced out of Poland when anti-Semitism reached its climax in 1968.

17. This month the cultural historian Marina Warner lectured fascinatingly on iconoclasms; in fact, iconoclasms against art are taking place in the streets of Lublin. Culture wars are being waged which pit a camp for openness against jingoists and pseudo-religious crusaders when Poland, Hungary and Russia have transitioned from false Communism to false Christianity. We need an eastern Europe that holds true to Transeuropa’s belief in “democracy, equality, culture beyond the nation state,” when we deplore the punishment of Pussy Rioters, the destruction of art in Lublin and Fidesz’s witch hunt of outstanding philosophers such as Agnes Heller:

18. The ambivalence of Lublin and Eastern Europe can be defined through the Derridean neologism of hostipitalité. Hostility and hospitality blend here: on the one hand, art activism is effervescent; on the other, censorship is crushing it. The Bakhtinian Pussy Rioters and Femen perform human rights, whilst extreme right ideas are employed by the political class.  The hunger for profit (ubiquitous privatizations) and classism are intensifying.

19. The Polish word for hospitality (goscinność) embraces otherness (inność). This linguistic phenomenon indicates that hospitality hosts alterity as hospital-alterity. Drawing on the Hebrew Bible, Lublin should become an open city (ville franche) or refuge city (ville refuge). The philosophers Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney define this city as a space where “migrants may seek sanctuary from the pressures of persecution, intimidation, and exile.” The feminist thinker Hélène Cixous also employs this idea of hospitality in her extraordinary plays and other texts. At his Lublin Labirynt Gallery lecture, the art historian Piotr Piotrowski elaborated on his concept of the critical museum as a place which could be paralleled by a “critical, self-critical city”; a self-critical, open-refuge city is of the utmost importance in our here and now. How can we enhance our common humanity — shared with refugees dying at the borders of the EU, and with women, migrants-turned-slaves, Jews, Roma, the homeless, the unemployed and the LGBT communities?

20. The destruction of the Lublin tickets has revealed social fissures. Artistic freedom has been jeopardized by controlling and vandalizing public artworks. It is our duty to reclaim the right to Lublin. We are following the activist and academic Ewa Majewska who has critiqued the evictions of both ordinary residents in Warsaw and Poznan and artistic venues (Warsaw’s Museum for Modern Art); similarly, in The Art Newspaper Julia Michalska has analysed anti-Romany hostilities in Hungary and political pressure to evict the Roma Parliament in Budapest.

21. We dream of Lublin becoming a hub of participatory democracy where minorities and majorities enjoy equal rights, are visible and decide together on the affairs of our polis. This city should cultivate hospitality, a truth Zygmunt Bauman has reminded us of. The commitment to opening Lublin to otherness depends on all of us.

The Pussy Riot trial will go down in the history of injustices as the Oscar Wilde trial of the 21^st century. Against the evil powers that be, the Moscow artists acknowledged their inspirers, fellow outcasts: Socrates (this connection to the martyr of philosophy has been noticed by David Remnick in The New Yorker), early feminist, transgender George Sand, and banished by Stalin, carnival researcher, Mikhail Bakhtin. Pussy Riot performs human rights. These women artists attack authoritarianism, misogyny, homophobia In their punk prayer, they protested Putin, the system, discrimination against the second sex, and as they sang, “gay pride exiled in chains to Siberia.” And still many hate them — and because of that they hate them. Why? In Eastern Europe the political class is anti-woman, anti-minority, anti-secular, because our countries have transitioned from false Communism to false Christianity: women, minorities, gays, artists to hell!

A formidable oppositionist movement is gaining strength: the supporters of Pussy Riot who don’t want prejudices to rule their life, demonstrations and shows of solidarity in the region and glocally, indignation of PEN Russia, PEN International, rock stars and the media, petitions (spearheaded in Poland’s leading broadsheet Gazeta Wyborcza by art critic Dorota Jarecka and signed by filmmakers Andrzej Wajda and Agnieszka Holland, curator Anda Rottenberg, Ethical Art professor Krzysztof Wodiczko ). Slovenian and cosmopolitan Slavoj Zizek wrote a letter to Pussy Riot with his characteristic wit: “It may sound crazy, but although I am an atheist, you are in my prayers.”

The brutal sentence on Pussy Riot encapsulates — beyond the headlines — the predicament which women face in Eastern Europe. Women curators in Hungary have been fired, and the world-renowned New School philosopher, Agnes Heller, has also been subject to a witch-hunt. Female artists and cultural operators in Poland have been humiliated. These prejudices are a major stumbling block in the democratic transition — in fact, phobias are destroying our societies. In Russia, women rebels are being killed: countless Chechen women, the human rights activist Galina Starovoytova, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the conceptual artist Anna Alchuk. When Alchuk was on trial for her art exhibit at the Sakharov Center, crowds surrounding the Taganka Court chanted “Go to Israel!”

During their trial, Pussy Riot sat locked in a cage that was originally built for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now incarcerated in a penal colony. Anti-Semitism permeated accusations again him. The prejudices against Pussy Riot bring back to life the anti-Jewish anti-intelligentsia bias from the Soviet times. Conceptual artist “Kabakov had to endure not only the difficulties faced by all Soviet citizens, but the additional burdens of living in a society hostile to Jews,” wrote Susan Tumarkin Goodman of the Jewish Museum. Pussy Riot makes the silent deconstructive style of Ilya Kabakov not only rude, but carnivalesque, Bakhtinian, bad!

Pussy Riot performed against Putin and about “the Lord’s shit” and “Mary the feminist.” I admire their all-women and queered activism, esthetics and ethics in opposition to the Russian system, to consumerism, to the unjust world order. To fight for our freedom from tyranny-misogyny-art-phobia, Pussy Riot forms a civil society badly in need of swear words, shock tactics and punk prayer. Their viscerally performative power is sophisticated and draws on philosophy and literature: from Montaigne to Judith Butler to Zizek. They sing wryly, not forgetting Derrida’s title Spectres de Marx, “Specters of Zizek washed away in the toilets.”

Pussy Riot continues the Bakhtinian tradition of holy folly and combines it with the explosiveness of punk. Esthetics for them is ethics, following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky and Brodsky and Szymborska (who recalled the equation in her Nobel Prize ceremony). Theirs is a Bakhtinian and a Kristevan madcap, topsy-turvy and humanitarian ethics: an ethics of human rights. Pussy Riot combines feminist and queer art as postulated in Seeing Differently by Amelia Jones. Iconographically and ideologically, the collective reminds me of women’s and LGBT visibility campaigns. Theirs is a socially engaged art as activism, which I’ve described as a new dissident civil society against the “moral majority.”

The women of Pussy Riot are the undesirables of our region: they incarnate nonconformity, protest against autocracy, sexual otherness. At the cathedral, they sang of the predicament of women in Russia, of the forbidden gay prides (Moscow courts have just forbidden queer pride parades for a hundred years!).

Maria Alyokhina told the judge during her closing statement: “I am not afraid of you and I am not afraid of the thinly veneered deceit of your verdict at this ‘so-called’ trial.” Nadia Tolokonnikova thinks subversively in the spirit of Socrates and Montaigne. Katya Samutsevich supports LGBT: “She has called particular attention to the plight of LGBT people in Russia, where official discrimination against so-called ‘sexual minorities’ is growing.” In a song released during the trial, Pussy Riot satirize a botoxed Putin and invite him to marry Belarus’s dictator Alexander Lukashenko. Same sex marriage for the tyrants.

In Eastern Europe, we’re not only anti-women, anti-minority and anti-secular: we are also anti-art. The women of Pussy Riot are performance artists. And as we know, artists always make trouble. That’s why they have been condemned for disrupting the public order. Homophobia, misogyny and xenophobia are countered by art. The women of Pussy Riot join many other women artists. Together they are dissidents and engaged performative actors in the public sphere, fighting a very tough and significant battle. Pawel Leszkowicz has called this art Women’s Revolt, “new art in the new state.” He tells a story of censored works created after 1989.

In Poland: the art of Alicja Zebrowska, Katarzyna Kozyra, Dorota Nieznalska and Zofia Kulik shows the religious and political pressure imposed on the body in the post-communist Poland of illegal abortion, vulnerability of women to unemployment and generally economic exclusions, sex business and phallocentrism. The artists expose and subvert the visual politics of patriarchy and the structure of gender norms. For her installation Passion which consists of a hanging metal cross with photographs of male genitalia and a video of the suffering face of an exercising body builder, a powerful study of masochistic masculinity, Dorota Nieznalska was sued and sentenced.

Nieznalska’s feminist intervention through the radical gesture highlighting the sex of Christ is at the same time a reference to Leo Steinberg’s study Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and its Modern Oblivion. Drawing on traditional religious representations, Steinberg brings to light the exposing of the penis of Jesus. Steinberg argues that the motif of ostentatio genitalium and the sexuality of Jesus is akin to displaying the wounds after the Passion, as it foregrounds the human aspect of Christ, his incarnation.

The League of Polish Families members attacked Nieznalska verbally and physically at the Gdansk gallery where her installation was being exhibited. In July 2003, a Gdansk court found Nieznalska guilty of “offending religious feelings.” It sentenced her to half a year of “restriction of freedom” (she was specifically banned from leaving the country) and ordered her to do work for a Catholic charity and pay all trial expenses. For a long time national venues refused to show her work, but Agata Jakubowska curated her one-woman show Submission and Pawel Leszkowicz featured her sadomasochist works in the exhibitions Love and Democracy and GK Collection. Currently Nieznalska supports the convicted women of Pussy Riot in the Gazeta Wyborcza’s appeal for them.

Because of the censorship imposed on art and on women and minority rights, a second revolution must happen in Poland. The first one in the 1980s, under the banner of Solidarity, was conducted in the name of the free nation and the collapse of communism. The group identity of Poles stands behind it. A second revolution, equally peaceful, should happen in the name of the freedom of women and minorities rights, opposing the danger of fundamentalism.

Abortion is illegal in Poland and calls to restrict the reproductive rights of women resonate throughout the region. A number of cultural and economic constraints are also still in place against women. This anti-art, anti-women domination underscores how post-Communist ultra nationalism blended with religion turned into an instrument of power.

Feudal serfdom survived in Russia and Poland until the 1860s: seniority, humiliations, civic sadomasochism are still intact. The revolt of 1989 was more of a restoration of the status quo ante,  of pre-Communist inequality. The transition taking place in post-Communist countries has now turned ultra-nationalist, as the majority discourse dehumanizes “Others.” The body politic privileges sexual sameness and a one-and-only model of the human: heterosexist, jingoist, fundamentalist. There are “so many devious ways of refusing the claims of humanity,” argues Martha C. Nussbaum. In her book From Disgust to Humanity Sexual Orientation & Constitutional Law Nussbaum is also one of the rare western observers to note the homophobia here. She comments perceptively: “Poland, by contrast [to the rest of the EU] still has a great deal of intense antigay feeling, as does Russia.”

The women artists intervene provocatively and shamelessly in the public sphere. Their brouhahas have a serious political message, are ludic, but not ludicrous, dignified, albeit breaking decorum, impertinent and pertinent alike. Pussy Riot neglects neither transgression nor sublimation – for they cure society, heal the ills of us all. The divine represents alterity itself, the most other otherness, and has nothing to do with national identity. Whereas in Poland or Russia the altar joins the throne in an officially holy but, in fact, unholy alliance, it is Pussy Riot who reclaim Mary-Miriam, Maryam (as she is called in the Koran).

Our anti-woman, anti-queer, anti-art prejudices have condemned and punished Pussy Riot. We’ve all sentenced Pussy Riot to the gulag. But Pussy Riot is triumphing now over tyranny, over hatred. Pussy Riot’s Socratic Apology in court is a new beginning. Eastern Europe needs this renewal – desperately.

Ms. Lyudmila Alexeyeva, legendary dissident in charge of the human rights NGO the Moscow Helsinki group told Reuters on the Pussy Riot trial: “As in most politically motivated cases, this court is not in line with the law, common sense or mercy.” Professor Piotr Piotrowski who has postmodernized art history in Eastern Europe wrote in Gazeta Wyborcza: “We must protest this repressive politics; we must defend human rights and freedom of expression everywhere where these values are threatened. Solidarity with the prosecute women artists is our moral obligation.”

It is our duty to demand immediate freedom for Pussy Riot and for all other prisoners of conscience throughout the world. It is our duty to intensify solidarity with all persecuted artists.