To the Bozar this morning to see ‘The Power of Fantasy: Modern and Contemporary Art from Poland’, a rich, high quality and fascinating exhibition curated to coincide with the Polish presidency of the Council of the European Union. The strongest themes of the works on display are, perhaps not surprisingly, tragedy and comedy and the absurdity of daily life. Poland’s long, tortured history is echoed in a number of works that are dark but  never entirely devoid of humour or hope. Perhaps the darkest and most sinister is Artur Smijewski’s Berek (Game of Tag), in which a group of young to middle-aged people, all stark naked, play a game of tag in a dark and sordid underground room, recalling concentration camps, though the laughs and smiles of the participants also recall the human spirit. The absurdity of daily life, particularly during the communist era, is disected and commented upon with a great deal of wit (‘Queue leaving the shop’, for example). For me the funniest is Zbigniew Rybezynski’s 1980 Tati-like film, Tango. Perhaps a majority of the artists on display only caught the tail end of the Communist era, but their works are still tinged with their knowledge of what went before. This exhibition was one of those events that again left me thanking my lucky stars I live in Brussels and Belgium. What similar-sized small city would have such a rich and varied cultural life?