The exhibition presented in Zachęta, “Progress and Hygiene”, is devoted to the pitfalls of modernization in the context of the idealistic faith in progress and the possibilities of “betterment” common to both art and science at the beginning of the 20th century. It was conceived as an essay which critically analyses such phenomena as genetic engineering, eugenics or research into the purity of races, also drawing attention to their continued impact on today’s world.

Invasion of Sound. Music and the Visual Arts proposes a reading of the esthetic relationship between the visual arts and music as relating to culture, rather to cultures. Such an approach can encompass the whole of music and, at the same time, art in its entirety. To be precise, the exhibition pays particular heed to the points of friction between different musical genres, between different esthetic universes, between different cultures. In other words, Invasion of sound. Music and the visual arts aims to reveal how certain musical contexts of particular works disclose a critical distancing with the cultural, social, historic or political norms that the work addresses.