Dear Audience,

We are happy to greet you with our first joint letter! We would like to announce this year’s exhibition program and, in doing so, begin an annual tradition. The offer of Zachęta extends beyond exhibitions, but we will first tell you about them. Our statutory task is to bring the most interesting phenomena in contemporary art and culture closer to you, as well as – perhaps most importantly – to support the relationship between the creator, the work, and the viewer.

This year at Zachęta, we will present the work of artistic collectives – both historical and contemporary – from Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania. We will take a look at the experiments with the film medium carried out in the 1970s by the Workshop of Film Form, which included Wojciech Bruszewski, Paweł Kwiek, Antoni Mikołajczyk, Józef Robakowski, Andrzej Różycki, Zbigniew Rybczyński, and Ryszard Waśko.

The other two collectives invited to Zachęta participated in the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2024. The Open Group collective, consisting of Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga, represented Poland, while Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda represented Lithuania. The themes of the projects presented in the national pavilions, which will also be developed in the exhibitions of these collectives at Zachęta, directly refer to current events (three years of full-scale war in Ukraine), as well as universal issues such as protective barriers like the immune system or borders.

Next week, we will present a selection of works from 1984–2021 by Andrea Fraser – an American artist and educator, a key representative of the institutional critique movement. In her performances, video works, and installations, the artist comments and reflects on the role of institutions and analyzes the impact of the art market on artistic practice.

The analysis of the potential of the new medium, mentioned in the context of the Workshop of Film Form, will also be the subject of the next group exhibition, scheduled for mid-year, featuring works by Ewa Partum, Teresa Kelm, and Zygmunt Krauze, along with works by Wojciech Fangor, Stanisław Zamecznik, Maria Pinińska-Bereś, and Henryk Stażewski. This project focuses on early experiments with spatial arrangements involving the audience.

In addition to the currently presented exhibition by Szymon Zakrzewski, the Zachęta Project Space will showcase the Heart of the Sun by artists Małgorzata Szandała, Marta Szulc, and Monika Waraxa. Later in the year, exhibitions by Alicja Kubicka and Katarzyna Depty-Garapich will be prepared.

In the fall, an international curatorial collective will raise the question of what remains of the idea of „friendship between nations” and how relations based on friendship and fraternity are shaped today in the post-socialist context. The exhibition will feature works by artists from Eastern Bloc countries and the Global South.

At the same time, a generational dialogue will be created through parallel solo exhibitions of the paintings of Giorgio Morandi and Joanna Fluder. Contemporary art will also be shown in a project prepared in collaboration with the Polish Art Foundation ING, which has been consistently building its collection in correspondence with Zachęta.

In addition to the exhibitions in Warsaw, we will also be realizing projects outside our country. We are preparing the first solo exhibition of Koji Kamojii in Japan, in cooperation with the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. The artist's work, who has been living and working in Poland since 1959, was presented at Zachęta in 2018.

At the Polish Pavilion as part of the 19th Architecture Biennale in Venice, a project titled Lary and Penates. On Building a Sense of Security in Architecture will be presented, prepared by Krzysztof Maniak, Katarzyna Przezwańska, Maciej Siuda, and Aleksandra Kędziorek.

We encourage you to visit the exhibitions and participate in accompanying events – it is a great opportunity to meet art and engage in conversations about important contemporary issues.

See you at Zachęta!

Agnieszka Pindera and Łukasz Adamski