What is a national identity and how is it defined? What power do these identities have to shape us and the way we produce art?

In this four-part podcast series, we challenge the notion of a static national identity and ask what affects our connection to a place. In conversation with artists, historians and guest speakers from around the globe, we explore what impact migration, exile, empire, war and shifting national boundaries have on how we define ourselves, where we feel we belong and how this influences the art we create.

In the first episode, we explore the meaning and power of identity through the fascinating case of Polish-Lithuanian Nobel Prize-winning writer Czesław Miłosz.

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Born in Lithuania, Miłosz survived the Nazi occupation of Poland, became a member of the Polish Foreign Service under the communist regime, and was then exiled for being a strong critic of communism. His famous collection of essays, The Captive Mind, reveals his struggle with his own sense of identity and belonging as an artist under a communist regime and became symbolic of the Baltic-Eastern European cultural, national and geopolitical ‘borderlands’.

We also explore other artists who were affected by the shifting of national boundaries during the first decades of the 20th century.

Speakers include British singer-songwriter Katy Carr, known for her songs about Polish history; Katia Denysova, a researcher on the influence of socio-political factors on Ukrainian art in the early 20th century; Professor Clare Cavanagh, specialist in modern Russian, Polish and Anglo-American poetry and a biographer of Miłosz; and Rigels Halili, lecturer in modern history and Balkans culture at Centre for East European Studies at Warsaw University.

Music:

Intro music: Fakiiritanssi by Marouf Majidi
Katy Carr: Mała Little Flower