Leave your kimonos and manga at home today; the once popular cliché “East Meets West” is so 1990s; in 2005, it’s all about “Eastern Europe meets South America, wherein religion meets pop culture and nudity.” Finally, things are getting interesting! And so if one were to suddenly find oneself in Warsaw on the day of Pope John Paul II’s funeral, this person never having had a cult-like obsession with anything but maybe Dr. Pepper and The Simpsons, one would be absolutely amazed. On Friday 8th April, the city of Warsaw became a massive public shrine, with big screen TVs broadcasting “the best of the Pope” and funeral candles that seemed to have gathered of their own free will into hundred-member huddles on street corners, not to mention the hordes of God-fearing Poles who took to the streets (in utter silence), making normal pedestrian traffic impossible.

But once you think you’ve seen it all, you come face-to-face with that new 2005 catchphrase. A two story high poster depicting thousands of Brazilian soldiers, some clothed in white and others naked, assembled to form an image of John Paul II’s face in profile. His “lips” upturned in a Mona Lisa-esque smile. In the foreground, thousands of mourners’ candles; in the background, the ominous Stalin-era Palace of Culture and Science. This has got to be some kind of joke. But it just might be for real. Actually, the photo, taken by Polish artist Piotr Uklanski, went on display weeks before the Pope’s death, on the site where the city plans to erect its first modern art museum. The spokeswoman of the Culture Ministry claimed at the time that the photo shows that “contemporary art does not have to be controversial and provocative.” Well, she obviously didn’t do her research on Mr. Uklanski, or maybe she was just so caught up in the religious euphoria of seeing the Pope’s face so big that she forgot to remember. The artist in question, after all, is responsible for an exhibition consisting of 100 photographs of popular actors stone-cold-faced and in Nazi uniform. He’s also set a man (a well-protected one) on fire as a performance piece, so he could document the audience’s reaction. And published, in an ad in Artforum, a photo he took of a woman’s bare ass, and revealed her identity (that’s Alison Gingeras, curator at the Pompidou, in case you were curious).

So with that track record behind him, crossing the Atlantic and landing himself in a country radically different from his native Poland, save for their devotion to Catholicism, and assembling 3500 soldiers, half of them in their party suits, in the shape of a smirking John Paul? Yes, that sounds a bit “controversial and provocative.” But the true glory of this 9.2x8 meter image, a glory Uklanski could never have imagined, came when it found itself at the epicenter of a city-wide shrine that enthusiastically gave a whole new meaning to the term religious iconography.