Created at the Polish Pavilion by the Institute of Architecture and Jakub Woynarowski, the exhibition Impossible Objects deals with the relations between modernism and politics in the context of building a modern nation state. The show’s highlight is a natural-scale replica of the canopy over the entrance to the burial crypt of Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the Polish political and military leader, created in 1937 at the Wawel Cathedral in Kraków according to a design of Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz. Several alternative variations of the canopy presented by the architect illustrate the process of arriving at a modernist form: from historicising loftiness to modern simplification.

With the onset of the post-Stalin ‘thaw’ in the Eastern Bloc countries and the proclamation of a scientific-technological revolution, science and technology became an important weapon in Cold War rivalries on both sides of the Iron Curtain, causing space flight, modern telecommunications and nuclear energy to emerge as the symbols of the following decade. New scientific disciplines, including astronautics and the literal ‘detachment from the earth’ it made possible, as well as the impact of cybernetics (now rehabilitated in the communist bloc) and its related disciplines such as biocybernetics, robotics or artificial intelligence, shaped the collective imagination and provided a strong inspiration for all artistic disciplines, from painting, sculpture and music to design, architecture and urban planning.

Real-Time Controller – exhibition prepared by Marta Węglińska, Maciej Nowacki and Martha Hryniuk – its first show had in the Silverado Gallery at the Poznań Academy of Fine Arts. In Zachęta Project Room curators will show a different version of the project, raising questions about the nature and opportunities to reproduce the principles of the original.

Becoming... is an installation consisting of hundreds of pompons — a set of inconspicuous coloured dots installed in space in a spontaneous, but well thought through configuration. The flexibility, mobility and modularity of the wired ‘fluffy atoms’ — which viewers can touch and set in motion — constitutes a spectacular performative aspect, liberating the composition from abstraction’s pomposity or conventionality.

Corpus is a group exhibition comprised of works relating to the body and corporality, inspired by the booksCorpus and Corpus II. Writings on Sexuality by Jean-Luc Nancy — one of the most important contemporary French philosophers.

The exhibition in Zachęta is the first such extensive presentation of the work of Zbigniew Warpechowski – a precursor of performance art in Poland and one of the first in the world to work in this genre – presenting documentation of several dozen of the actions realized by the artist over the course of the last 50 years.

Previously shown in the Polish Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition in Venice, the sound sculpture Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More is based primarily on the manipulation of the tolling of a bell – an ancient instrument which has for centuries set the rhythm of our earthly and ‘eternal’ lives.