Decolonising the Arts – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

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• Inaya Folarin Iman

• is a broadcast journalist, commentator, and campaigner. She regularly appears as a panellist on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Politics Live.
• Iman is the founder and director of The Equiano Project, a forum promoting freedom of speech and open dialogue on the subjects of race, identity, and culture. She co-convened and co-programmed a major transatlantic conference on race and identity politics at the University of Cambridge in January 2023. She is National Portrait Gallery’s Cultural Management and Youth Engagement Trustee. She was the creator and host of The Discussion, the weekly show on ideas, culture, and politics airing on GB News, and writes regular columns for The Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph. Iman has also helped found and deliver numerous freedom of speech initiatives including Index on Censorship’s Free Speech Is For Me, the Free Speech Union, and the Free Speech Champions project.

• Piotr Juszkiewicz

• is an art historian and professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań where he lectures at the Institute of Art History.
• His interests include 20th-century art history, contemporary art, and art criticism in the 18th-20th centuries. He has received grants and fellowships from Cambridge University, The Getty Grant Program, Rochester University, and Edinburgh University. He also lectured at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Art Academy in Tallin.
• Juszkiewicz has edited of publications including Melancholia Jacka Malczewskiego  [The Melancholy of Jacek Malczewski] (1998) and Perspektywy współczesnej historii sztuki [Perspectives on Contemporary Art History] (2009), and is the author of several books:  Wolność i metafizyka. O tradycji artystycznej twórczości Marcela Duchampa  [Freedom and Metaphysics. On the Artistic Tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s Art] (1995); Od rozkoszy historiozofii do gry w nic. Polska krytyka artystyczna czasu odwilży [From the Bliss of Historiosophy to the “Game of Nothing”. Polish Art Criticism of the Post-Stalinist “Thaw”] (2005); Cień modernizmu [The Shadow of Modernism] (2013), and numerous texts in Artium Quaestiones, Centropa, Rocznik Historii Sztuki, and the Journal of Victorian Culture. He was also the leader of a research project (2012-2015) on Polish art documentaries in 1945-1989. In 2021, he curated the exhibition: A New Beginning. Modernism in The Polish Second Republic at the National Museum in Kraków (NMK). He is currently working on an exhibition of post-WWII modernism in Poland at the NMK.
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Manick Govinda

• independent writer, artists mentor, lecturer, curator and arts consultant. He has written for The Critic, Index on Censorship, Arts Professional, Open Democracy and Spiked. He is the co-curator, alongside Agnieszka Kolek, of Culture Tensions, a new series of public discussions and conversations at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Manick describes himself as an Eclecticist, open to different ideas and thoughts, open to unresolved contradictions. He was cancelled in 2019 by many English arts institutions for his gender critical comments and humour on social media and for his vocal criticism against the European Union.
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Agnieszka Kolek

• artist, curator and co-founder of the Passion for Freedom Art Festival in London. Through supporting artists forbidden to exhibit their art, she exposes the silence of many and challenges the comfortable position of those who inhibit “safe spaces”. Agnieszka survived the terror attack in Copenhagen in 2015. She continued the meeting on art and blasphemy after the attack by saying: “They not only want to kill us. They want us to stop talking, so we should continue.”