Maria Wasilewska's Game Over #2 at Amy-D Milano Confronts Nationalism

Polish artist Maria Wasilewska (born 1971 in Toruń) presents Game Over #2 at Amy-D space in Milan, a project critiquing resurgent nationalist tendencies in Europe and beyond. The exhibition features steel structures, a video, and neon signs reading 'ON' and 'OFF'. The video animates nationalist symbols from various countries—including fascist symbols from Germany and Italy, a Celtic cross, the Polish falanga, and the Wolfsangel rune used by Ukraine's Svoboda party—which morph into abstract puddles and then into steel forms filled with toxic oil, creating reflective surfaces. Two guns greet visitors at the entrance. Wasilewska began the project in 2018, first showing it at MOS gallery in Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland, in June 2018. For Milan, she added the neon signs to emphasize choice. The artist states that art must react to frightening political realities and hopes it can build consciousness. She also comments on the recent removal of works by Natalia LL and Katarzyna Kozyra from the National Museum in Warsaw, calling it absurd and a regression for women's roles. Wasilewska links Poland's current cultural situation to the post-1989 transformation, where economic recovery took precedence over culture, and the Church filled the spiritual void. She notes that the Polish Consulate in Milan objected to her project's theme, threatening to suspend collaboration, though she views this as a matter of individual interpretation.