Punk band elegy for murdered Polish student
By Mike Wade

A punk band and a naked actress singing an elegy will feature next month in Glasgow's artistic tribute to Angelika Kluk, the Polish student murdered 18 months ago and buried in a city-centre church.

The work has been commissioned for the Glasgow International (Gi) art festival from Wilhelm Sasnal, an artist from Krakow who is championed by his admirers as "Poland's Roy Lichtenstein". It is, he says, a "very sensitive" tribute to Angelika's "naivety" rather than an attack on the morality of the Catholic Church.

But the shock effect of the £20,000 film has already been attacked by the new parish priest of St Patrick's, Anderston, where the young woman's body was found in an underground chamber near the confession box.

"What we are trying to do is like overcoming any kind of bereavement. You never forget what you've lost, but at the same time you have to try to move forward," said Canon Robert Hill, who has been priest at St Patrick's since it re-opened last August.

"My first reaction is to wonder how helpful this will be for this community to move forward, or for Angelika's family. I doubt it will be helpful at all."

When Ms Kluk's murder case came to court last year, lawyers conceded that the case was "sensational and bizarre" in the extreme.

Witnesses included Canon Hill's predecessor, Father Gerry Nugent, 63, an alcoholic priest who admitted having a sexual relationship with Ms Kluk, and Martin Macaskill a married man who was having a passionate affair with Ms Kluk, apparently with his wife's knowledge. A 65-year-old Aberdeen sheriff, Kieran McLernan, who had been teaching Ms Kluk golf, also gave evidence.

Sasnal, whose work hangs in London's Tate Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, admitted he had never heard of Angelika until he visited Glasgow last summer, shortly after the end of her murderer's trial.

He said he had been immediately impressed by the "universal" quality of her story, which would be understood by people of all ages and from different cultures.

An elegy on film seemed an appropriate way forward. Entitled The Other Church, and scripted by Marcim Pryt, it purports to be written by Angelika, with much of the content derived from Polish websites where her fate was discussed at length.

"The song is about her naivety. There are some strong words, but it is written from her point of view. Marcim is a very sensitive guy and we discussed his concerns about such a delicate issue. I hope no boundary was crossed," said Sasnal.

Pryt is the shaven-headed lead singer of 19 Wiosen (19 Seasons), a band from Lodz, who play the music in the film. Their first record release included the song F***ing S*** All the Time, and their most recent album is entitled The Paedophile.

Sasnal added that the Catholic Church would have been too obvious a target for his film. "How she was used by that priest Father Nugent - that is about a double morality. That was no surprise to me, or for many young people in Poland. But it was too easy to go with that. I preferred it to be about her, not the Catholic church."

The film will be shown in the basement of a derelict house in the Merchant City. Francis McKee, the curator of Gi, said Angelika's story had "a clear relation to a song, in terms of a story and a narrative".

He added: "There is a very long tradition of folk music - we still sing songs from the 14th century. These sorts of incidents live on. They're reinterpreted and become landmarks of the culture. Wilhelm has approached it so sensitively in his film. You would have to try hard to make this sensational."