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.

The year 1968 is a time of the culmination of a great number of wildly different political and social tensions. Protests, unrest and demonstrations took place all over the world, from Mexico and the U.S.A., through Germany, France, Poland and Czechoslovakia to as far as Japan (without neglecting Latin America). The exhibition Revolutions 1968 does not present the art of those times. It is rather an attempt to portray this period through art (although not just through art) from different perspectives: historical and documentary, or through interpretations and re-interpretations of social problems and cultural phenomena characteristic of this turbulent time.