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.

The exhibition Monument. The Architecture of Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz, connected with the presentation in the Polish Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale in Venice, concerns the issue of the mythmaking potential of architecture. Szyszko-Bohusz, a former legionary connected with Józef Piłsudski, as an architect of the regime projected monuments: buildings that were to act as the memorials of the epoch, to express the spirit of the reborn state and to revive its praiseworthy history, but also to give testimony to the good life and progress through the effective realizing of the commissions of the political and financial elites of the day.

The projects presented at the Zachęta and the opposite Saxon Garden public park were inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the famous story of a girl who finds herself in a mysterious world, where she experiences incredible adventures and meets peculiar creatures.  The story’s absurd dream logic has made it one of the most original and inspiring books ever written.

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.

Alice: Wonderland Across the Road (a twin project to Włodzimierz Jan Zakrzewski. Alice at Sakson Garden) is presented at the Zachęta’s ground floor. Here the inspiration came from Carroll’s play with scale, perspective and space.

In My Global Problems, Alicja Łukasiak presents her recent works. The artist spent the last few years travelling – around the Far East mainly, but also throughout rural Poland – and became preoccupied with ecology, reading about climate change and other hazards resulting from the destruction of nature and wasteful exploitation of natural resources.

Monika Zawadzki creates simple forms, in the vein of traditional graphic design, using sculpture, painting, and video. One of the main themes of her work is the idea of identity creation, expressed through various universal and simple shapes. Zawadzki is preoccupied with issues of social exclusion or limitation, the mechanisms of individual functioning, alterity and corporeality, which she investigates from a broad perspective.

The exhibition has been inspired by Tarjei Vesaas’s book The Ice Palace (1963). Everything began in 2012 when Magda Franczak, an artist living and working in Lublin, met Tel Aviv-based Yael Frank, who was presenting her work at Lublin’s Labirynt Gallery. The acquaintance soon revealed deeper – going beyond just last-name or hair-colour similarity – affinities between the two artists, concerning existential (generational) histories or artistic interests. The meeting led to the idea of producing a joint project for the Zachęta Project Room.

This exhibition organised to mark the centenary of the birth of Henryk Tomaszewski – graphic artist, designer, cartoonist and one of the most important figures of Polish graphic art after the Second World War – will present the unusually expressive, unique style of the artist’s graphic design and its sources.

The largest Polish presentation of Paulina Ołowska’s work to date, the exhibition shows both its thematic diversity and the various working methods employed by the artist. It features works of painting, sculpture, stage design, installation, neon light, assemblage, drawing, collage, textile, as well as a new installation, created specially for the exhibition: a fashion store with a collection by the brand Clemens en August.

Kuba Dąbrowski is a renowned, talented, interdisciplinary and still young photographer. His monographic exhibition comprises a selection of images from various periods and fascinations, from various contexts and registers, arranged – like the titular ‘film drama’ – into a sequence. The author himself seems to have been cast in the lead role, the tentativeness owing to the universal character of the story being told.

The exhibition deals with ‘dangerous liaisons’ between the visual arts and music. Not only music lovers know that Brazil is truly a musical melting pot: bossa nova, samba, tropical psychedelia or funk are but some of the contemporary trends present in Brazilian music. Artistic crossovers and interdisciplinary approaches being characteristic for Brazilian artists, the exhibition at the Zachęta Project Room presents works that feature musical themes.

The exhibition presents young Brazilian artists who in their work refer to the classics of contemporary art from their country, primarily modernist visual artists and architects.

The exhibition presents a dynamic map of the post-WWII art world in the context of Polish artists’ and art critics’ travels to Europe and beyond. Marked on the map have been the points and vectors of those travels but also how – despite the Iron Curtain and the policies of mutual isolation – knowledge and inspirations were exchanged. The titular ‘migrations’ pertain not only to the artists themselves and their official and semi-official foreign trips but also to the phenomenon of travelling works and wandering ideas.

Robert Maciejuk and Honza Zamojski’s Above and Below exhibition is a culmination of their long-time friendship and artistic collaboration, which has seen a joint book project, Vases, and two exhibitions of Maciejuk’s art curated by Zamojski at Galeria Starter.

Frydrych analyzes the world in its linguistic aspect while noticing also the perceptual power of images. His recent projects skilfully blur the boundaries between the two facets of reality. The show at the ZPR is an all-embracing art form, a sensorial environment.

Although Romai people live among us, there are a lot of issues that divide us. Most of all, it is our perception of the mentioned ethnically-foreign co-inhabitants. The exhibition presents, among others, the collection of clichѐ representations: etchings, photographs and paintings (from 19th to 20th century), which reflect stereotypical image of the Roma in Polish art.

For the sixth time the Deutsche Bank Foundation, Deutsche Bank Polska, and the Zachęta — National Gallery of Art are happy to announce the Views 2013 – Deutsche Bank Foundation Award competition exhibition presenting the most interesting young, but already established, Polish artists. Unlike in the previous years, there are five finalists and all featured works are premiere presentations.

The exhibition focuses purely on the exploration of the variety of religious beliefs and practices of which the United States is composed.

The exhibition presents films created by Wojciech Gilewicz in recent years during his travels to Asia and the United States. Showing painting and performative interventions in urban space, sometimes in nature, the films are not so much documentations of artistic actions as autonomous impressions though, paradoxically, of a very well thought-out structure and composition.

Romuald Broniarek, Aleksander Jałosiński, Bogdan Łopieński, Jan Morek, Wojciech Plewiński, Tadeusz Rolke

These six photographers – the oldest of them born in 1928, the youngest in 1940 – spent most of their professional lives in communist Poland. All of them worked for official presstitles. This exhibition of photographs, however, is an unofficial portrait of those times. The photos do not show government ceremonies, hierarchically framed heads of state or the heroes of propaganda reports. The people presented in the photographs are not at work: they are at leisure, using their time freely.

The Rise and Fall of Air is the second part of sculptor Katarzyna Krakowiak’s ‘architectural trilogy’, following Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers, which received a special mention at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. It is not however a simple relocation of her intervention in the Polish Pavilion.

A project by students of Łukasz Skąpski at the Art Academy in Szczecin. A direct inspiration for the exhibition at the Zachęta Project Room was a signing of a bill that legalized in Poland the registration and trading of genetically modified seeds.  At large, displayed works focus on the issues revolving around transgenic crops.

Other City is a documentary photographic project that attempts to visually map the area of the Jewish ghetto (Warsaw Ghetto, 1940–1943) created by Nazi Germany in the heart of the Polish capital. The artists photograph the area from the rooftops and top floors of buildings using a 4x5 inch-sheet camera. They work from autumn to spring, on sunless days, avoiding chiaroscuro and trying to avoid capturing foliage as this blurs the street grid and alters the modelling of solid figures. The project is in colour, which is perceived by the artists as more realistic and natural than black-and-white photography.

Zachęta – National Gallery of Art will present the first individual exhibition in Poland of the work of Peter Land – one of the best-known contemporary artists from Denmark. The show will comprise a selection of projects from different periods of the artist's activity. Major part of the show will consist of films and video installations created from the mid-90s, in which the author appears in different costumes and slapstic situation.

The exhibition explores the paradigm shift of “being an artist”. During the past 20 years, artists have been forced to redefine their place on the map of social roles and economical interdependences. A stark example of this transformation that took on quite a radical form was the artists' strike in May 2012, initiated by the Civic Forum for Contemporary Art. This topic constructed a bracket for this exhibition that was largely inspired by the libretto of the first national German opera by Carl Maria von Weber's entitles Freelancer (premiered in 1821).

Polish Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia
Konrad Smoleński Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More

This project is a continuation of the previous explorations of this artist, who, being active for over a decade in the domain of visual arts, focusses his interest on sound.

Christian Hutzinger’s W/W is an installation that combines painting and architecture. In a previously unused space, the artist has placed his trademark elements: a letter, a geometric figure, and colour. These play with the ‘inconvenient’ architecture of a basement niche, stressing its function as an ‘entrance/exit’ or ‘introduction’ to what awaits inside. The letter ‘W’, with its many meanings, is a sign that the artist plays with on every possible level.

Basia Bańda’s most recent project, Daily News – Warsaw, which has been created specially for the Zachęta Project Room, features collages with elements of drawing, and sculptural objects. The project was inspired by news headlines published by the Warsaw edition of the web portal Gazeta.pl. 

Aneta Grzeszykowska’s exhibition features films from recent years and a new photographic series created specially for the show. The selection highlights the key strategies employed by the artist: manipulation of film and photographic media, and thus also of the viewer, and creative appropriation of other artists’ works. The featured projects illustrate also the major themes of her work: reworking of personal histories, issues of bodily representation, such as unceremonious self-exposition, but also self-destructive gestures – obsessive returns to the motif of invisibility, self-erasure.

project within the exhibition The Splendour of Textiles

A collaborative project between Joanna Malinowska and Christian Tomaszewski was originally commissioned by Performa’09 and later presented at Nottingham Contemporary. The project explores how the future was imagined under the Communist regimes of the former Soviet Bloc by investigations through the lenses of architecture, music, fashion and style. The project also incorporates other elements related to a diverse range of Eastern Block phenomena, including the Soviet space program, sci-fi film and literature, and a journey to the site of the mysterious 1908 explosion over the Tunguska River Valley in central Siberia.

The exhibition The Splendor of Textiles presents artistic textiles in the wider context of contemporary art and focuses the attention of viewers on a field of creative work that in recent decades has lain outside the principal zones of interest  of leading exhibition institutions. Both the splendor of the title, associated with brilliance, richness and power, and the presentation in a national gallery of art have the goal of returning textiles to their rightful place in the orbits of contemporary art.

The exhibition presents the works of two young artists from Ukraine – Yasia Khomenko and Gamlet. Not an artistic duo, the two are independent artists sharing a passion for visual storytelling.

The exhibition’s underlying concept has been inspired in large part by one of Julian Antonisz’s inventions: a portable device for creating non-camera animations. The easy-to-use, compact mechanism was meant to enable the viewer to react creatively to the ‘unreal reality’ surrounding them. The idea of developing a ‘portable non-camera workshop’ was also part of a larger, ambitious project aimed at effecting the viewer’s artistic mobilization through the popularization of amateur non-camera animation.

The exhibition is the first such extensive presentation of all the fields of the work of Julian Antoniszczak (Antonisz) – the co-founder of the legendary Animated Film Studio in Cracow, director of experimental animated films, constructor, musician and inventor.

Cuban motifs in Zachęta Project Room.

Zacheta National Gallery of Art presents the first-ever survey exhibition by Piotr Uklański in his native country. Uklański is considered one of Poland’s most accomplished living artists.

Think Crazy is the name of the artistic strategy and at the same time the title of the exhibition of Marek Konieczny, an artist pivotal for the conceptual breakthrough in Polish art at the turn of the 1960s/1970s, but also, from the late 1970s, a ‘deserter of conceptualism”, one of the pioneers of mail art and unconventional artistic practices in public space.

Anna Molska’s newest project is a journey to the southern edge of the world: the mysterious and still as yet not fully explored “Sixth Continent”.

The artist’s most recent projects were inspired by, among other things, the events in crisis-stricken Madrid – street protests that have become an example to follow for citizens disillusioned with the present socio-economic order elsewhere in the world.

The exhibition of works by Marlene Dumas marks the first presentation of this outstanding artist in Poland. Rather than a comprehensive retrospective, this exhibition developed in collaboration with the artist, focuses on a number of themes present in Dumas’ rich output.

Can young artists afford artistic hooliganism? Is the fascination with real or potential destruction in art a way to revolutionary changes or just an artistic strategy? What is the purpose of artistic pranks and mischief?

This exhibition is an attempt to present the history of a gallery that for eighteen years of its operations remained a non-commercial space for presenting the work of artists from all over the world.

All architecture is essentially a phenomenon of sound – it constitutes the environment in which sound spreads, enhancing some of its qualities at the expense of others. But it also absorbs, filters, and transmits sound. The project by Katarzyna Krakowiak can be seen as part of a wider revival of interest in sound over recent years. Owing to its fleeting, invisible, and almost imperceptible character, which is at the same time intimate and physical, the work is an apt metaphor for our contemporaneity – filled with anxiety and a compulsive need for contact with other people.

Issues of urban greenery or bio-guerrilla feature frequently in the work of younger artists. Jaśmina Wójcik’s project goes a bit farther, trying to attract the usual gallery non-goers by presenting gardening as a kind of artistic practice. Raising the important issue of the need for balancing the proportion of built-up and green areas in the modern city is an extra value here.

Many artists play along with the historical iconography of the past. They look for inspiration to old books, magazines, or films. The practice of Konrad Maciejewicz can be seen as an example of such an approach. With a background in painting and graphics, the artist turned to collages, employing photographs from Polish women’s magazines from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s – he seems equally interested in their imperfect mechanical visuality, as with the air of oddity, or even terror, they evoke.

The exhibition Art Everywhere. The Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw 1904–1944 constitutes the first such extensive presentation of the interweaving of art and everyday life during the period of the Second Polish Republic. It is a large scale project of historical research conceived in a very contemporary way.

At their new exhibition entitled Dzikie•Wild, Małgorzata Jabłońska and Piotr Szewczyk present two works created especially for the exhibition and three earlier projects. The works are linked by the theme of ‘nature’.

The Emotikon project had its first instalment in the Art Museum in Łódź in the spring of 2011. The exhibition is a summary of a trip that Robert Rumas and Piotr Wyrzykowski made around a number of countries of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor. In search of emotions, they visited Turkey, Georgia, Ukraine and Romania, places that are geographically, culturally and aesthetically diverse. The artists, in the vein of two traveller-documentalists, explored places and stories without a preconceived scenario, thus giving the exhibition a sociological and anthropological character.

On a Journey is a second exhibition realised by the Zachęta National Gallery of Art as part of the project Art Gallery at Chopin Airport. The works on display are from Zachęta’s current collection, built since the 1990s and comprising mainly works by contemporary Polish artists exhibited at the Zachęta or projects co-produced by the gallery.

The exhibition deals with the relations between contemporary sculpture and modernism: a concept here understood as the striving towards modernity observable in art from the 1910s to the 1970s. The common denominator for the sculptures selected at the exhibition is their reference to such modernist tendencies as the rejection of ornamentation in the name of a simplification and purity of forms and constructions, as well as a concentration on the value of material and the function of an object.

Doubly Regained Territories is a presentation of three artistic projects: by Bogdan Łopieński, Andrzej Tobis and Krzysztof Żwirblis. A photographer-reporter, a painter, who with the help of his photographic apparatus and a Polish-German dictionary undertakes a utopian project of describing the world, and a director-performer-animator activating a small, local (neighbourhood) community – all three of whom through their activities strive to regain peripheral territories lost to everyday banality.

Rafał Milach presents the stories of Russians who were born in the USSR, but  whose adult lives run their course in the Russia of Vladimir Putin. This is a tale of ordinary people, of their friends and family, and of the world in which they live. In Milach’s photographs are to be found neither extremism nor sensationalism. We observe the everyday life of representatives of the generation of thirty-somethings that the photographer has been a witness to over the course of the last six years.

Karolina Freino’s exhibition Erase Boards in the Kordergarda Project is the final presentation in the cycle Room with a View that has been ongoing since 2007.

The exhibition, Warsaw ENcourages, presents selected works from the Zachęta’s collection. The present  collection has been systematically built up since the 1990s and mainly comprises works by Polish contemporary artists who have exhibitions at the gallery as well as works co-produced by Zachęta as part of its projects. Zachęta National Gallery of Art as part of the project Art Gallery at Warsaw Chopin Airport.

No, No, I Hardly Ever Miss a Show is a project about the public, for public, that is also co-created by the public. Zachęta’s exhibition halls became a space for an exchange of ideas and thoughts, both in a ‘traditional’ way (art pieces, lectures, discussions), as well as in an interactive manner (workshops, art interventions). The exhibition reveals the mechanisms through which the gallery operates, and demonstrates the processes involved in the preparation and running of an exhibition.

Goshka Macuga’s exhibition is both the first individual presentation of the artist’s work in Poland, as well as a project created especially for Zachęta. Macuga’s method of work is called an “archeology of culture” and is founded to a great extent on the research of archives linked with the history of an institution. At the exhibition in the Zachęta Gallery, Macuga is preparing a project that concerns censorship in Polish art after 1989, and also attacks of all types on works of art, artists, curators and directors.

The Centrala collective operates in the field of architecture, interior design and architectural criticism. The exhibition in Projekt Kordegarda was created due to the tenth anniversary of Centrala existence and presents designs and the main themes of their work.

Zachęta Ermutigung, the first individual exhibition in Poland of works by the world famous photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, has been prepared by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf in cooperation with Zachęta National Gallery of Art.

City as Studio will present the works of Indian artists and practitioners who participated in the SARAI programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi – one of India’s leading research institutes producing critical thought on the development, particularly in reference to South Asia. City as Studio project sought to bring contemporary artistic practice into space of today’s urbanity and resulted in creating cultural processes in locations in Delhi.

The Views – Deutsche Bank Foundation Award biannual competition (the first edition took place in 2003) is the most important project today supporting the development and promotion of young Polish art, and the very participation in it has become a major distinction. The initiative facilitates promoting, in Poland and abroad, the best young-generation artists and rewarding the most interesting artistic positions and strategies.

The Generation in Transition exhibition presents the artworks of a young generation of artists of Indian origin, living and working in India, as well as in America and Europe. It is the first extensive showcase of contemporary art from this region presented in Central Europe in recent years. 

The exhibition Diaries presents Agata Bogacka’s newest paintings, a part of which were made under the influence of family histories either remembered or rediscovered after many years, and an interest on the artist’s part in her own genealogy. 

How is an exhibition produced?
Who is a curator?
Is Katarzyna Kozyra scandalous?
Answers to these and other art questions can be found in the series of 11 educational films about contemporary art created by Zachęta and pleple.tv*.  All these captivating and exciting tales, such as To pee in a bun – what happens to Zachęta’s collection when no one is looking?, or All creatures great & small – is the curator a predator?, and the remaining nine films are inspired by exhibitions shown at Zachęta.

The Kama Sokolnicka exhibition is a presentation of the newest works by the Wrocław artist. In the collages from the cycle Dissapoint of View presented in Project Kordegarda and two series of paintings, Sokolnicka moves in areas well known from her earlier works, at the same time opening up new themes.

The exhibition Bodily Choreography explores the relations between the visual arts and choreography and dance, by showing works by contemporary artists making use of different choreographic configurations, more or less dance or movement oriented or dynamic in nature, sometimes simply suggested by a minimal level of movement.

The exhibition … and Europe will be stunned will be the official Polish participation at the 54th International Art Exhibition in Venice in 2011. This video installation by the Israeli-born artist Yael Bartana will be the first time a non-Polish national has represented Poland in the history of the Venice Biennale.

A film by the Israeli artist Yael Bartana, Assassination is presented parallel to the exhibition … and Europe will be stunned in the Polonia Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition in Venice. For the first time ever, Poland is represented in the biennale by a foreign artist. Assassination is the last part of Bartana’s ‘Polish’ trilogy, which also includes Nightmares (2007) and Wall and Tower (2009).

The exhibition presents works by contemporary artists from Brussels and Liège – sculpture, painting, performance and films – and came about thanks to curatorial study visits to these cities.

This exhibition attempts to provide Belarusians with a possibility to look at their art from the outsider’s perspective, without common taboos. Most of the works in the project, in one or another way, reflect upon Belarusian society and its concerns today, but only a few dare to openly express things that ‘we don’t talk about’. Potentially the project can open new channels of communication for Belarus’ comparatively isolated and internationally unknown art scene. In other words, the successful realization of it can leave the door slightly ajar.

Bartosz Mucha’s 52 Lazy Weeks. Paraarchitecture at Kordegarda Project crowns a year-long project by the artist/designer/humorous observer of life. Starting from April last year, Mucha created one quasi-architectural design a week. The resulting 52 designs, depicted and described by the artist, have now been published in a book under the same title. 

The compilation of video presented in ursula blikle lounge is a selection of works from the Zachęta video collection. The programme of the thematic screenings of videos is a spectrum, in other words a certain organized selection of phenomena and concepts analysed by the films’ authors. It is a presentation of works of the newest video art in Poland, created by outstanding artists of the young and middle generation. The screenings that comprise the project Spectrum have been divided into the following thematic blocks: sound, gender, social portrait and roles. The selection made was dictated in part by the technical conditions of the place of presentation – the videos selected were one channel projections, whose theme and aesthetics made them appropriate to be shown in the proposed form. The choice of these works was also an attempt to underline the range of themes that Polish video artists engage with. It shows both a cross-section and the spectrum of problems relevant today in Polish art. This should not be treated as a full picture, but rather as an overview of Polish video art of the last two decades.

The project Stories of the Ear was inspired by the cooperation between the Ludwig van Beethoven Society, organizer of the 15th Easter Ludwig van Beethoven festival, and the artists who have created poster projects to promote this musical event, such as the Group Twożywo, Bartek Materka, Marcin Maciejowski and the author of the visual component for the upcoming festival, Anna Molska. The presentation of selected works by these artists will act as a pretext for a wide-ranging exploration of the connections between the visual arts and sound.

The Neo Rauch exhibition in the Zachęta National Gallery of Art is the first full overview of the painting of an artist who is an outstanding phenomenon of the German and European scene. This show will also be one of the relatively few presentations of German art made in Poland over recent years.

The exhibition presents the fruits of several decades of work by the Warsaw artists Hanna and Gabriela Rechowicz in the field of the decoration of buildings of public use and exhibition pavilions in Poland and abroad.

The subject of the exhibition is the work of three female artists, pioneers of Polish women’s art: Ewa Partum, Natalia Lach-Lachowicz and Maria Pinińska-Bereś, who died in 1999. From the 1970s onwards, they have been linked by a similar quest in which a clear feminist intuition or an identification with feminism is perceptible. Despite this, however, this will be the first time when their works are set alongside one another in such a configuration.

The exhibition presents the works of a couple of outstanding artists of the young generation – Ana and Adam Witkowski. The authors have undertaken an artistic analysis of their own home/flat (and also of the architecture of Kordegarda Project and of themselves as those who dwell in it – between a feeling of safety and a fear of a real or virtual interference into the peace/wholesomeness of the home. The subjectivity of architecture, the similarity of human experiences, a play with context, and works made specially in view of this exhibition – all of this the viewer will find at the exhibition Housemates.

In the 17th year after the publication of Imperium we will have had the opportunity to see an exhibition of the photographs that emerged in the years 1989–1991 and that were the fruit of Ryszard Kapuściński's travels around the republics of the former USSR. These photographs up until now have not been exposed except for the few that found their way into the album From the World. They were found two years ago in Kapuściński's private album. From the manner in which the material was segregated and the selection of the photographs one can presume that he was thinking about an exhibition about Imperium.

A film by a graduate of Grzegorz Kowalski’s studio at the Warsaw Academy of the Fine Arts. Roman Szlachcic’s tale about his father, Franciszek Szlachcic, a well-known party figure and high ranking officer of the secret service in the People’s Republic of Poland is in reality a moving image of his son, cherishing the memory of his “fantastic father”, living in the past in his father’s former residence in Magdalenka, not far from Warsaw.

Nearly twenty years have passed since those events and Zachęta is holding her solo exhibition. This is not a retrospective, although all of Kozyra’s best known works – e.g. Animal Pyramid, Bathhouse, Men’s Bathhouse, The Rite of Spring and the films from the In Art Dreams Come True series – are on show. The exhibition marks a new phase in the artist’s latest project, an autobiographical feature film, for which she is seeking an actress/actor to play the main role – herself.

Ferit Kuyas’s exhibition City of Ambition presents a series of photographs made between 2004 and 2008. Published earlier in book format, we are presenting them at Kordegarda Projekt in the form of large-size prints and wall projections. Thus the viewers will be able to see several dozen images of Chongqing, one of the many Chinese cities growing at an impressively and terrifyingly rapid pace, currently occupying an area equal to one third of Poland, inhabited by over 32 million people.

Videorama  is a serie of projections presenting video works produced by austrian artists. This project was preapared by curator from Kunsthalle in Vienna. It is a slection from archive, which gathers almost 1500 works by 900 artists – ursula blickle videoarchiv. Created in March 2007  allows free of charge access to rich collection. works selection presented in Zacheta is a part of the exhibition shown in Kunsthalle in Vien.

The exhibition From Kaliningrad with Love has been organised as part of the Kordegarda Project’s Room with a View ‘urban’ series in association with the Kaliningrad Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA), the city’s leading artistic institution. The exhibition presents a portrait of Kaliningrad – a city with a complicated history, as seen through the eyes of the visual artists based there. The show features artists from various generations, presenting photographs, video installations and conceptual works.

The exhibition Hokaina is a monographic presentation of the work of Jakub Julian Ziółkowski, a highly successful young Polish artist who made his debut in 2004. In the frame of this year's Gwangju Biennale he showed a series of drawings illustrating George Bataille's Story of the Eye, which the magazine Artforum declared one of the “hits” of the Biennale.

The monographic Annette Messager exhibition in Zachęta is the first retrospective of the artist’s work in Poland. Selected works from over the course of the artist’s whole career will be presented in six of the gallery’s exhibition rooms and its entrance hall.

The installation by artist Agnieszka Kurant and architect Aleksandra Wasilkowska, curated by Elias Redstone, seeks to exceed the logic of urban reality through the creation of urban portable holes. The title, Emergency Exit, refers ironically to the health and safety regulations in buildings and urban space that seek to plan, control risk and eliminate the accidental and unexpected. The project consists of building a high structure in the Polish pavilion, resembling a diving board or a ski jump, that towers over a sea of clouds.

Fabulous Łódź – with its history, still to be clearly felt in the urban tissue, its social issues, a continuing modernization and commercialisation of public space, the unique Muzeum Sztuki and the avant-garde tradition, a history of famous projects organised by artists for artists, the world-renowned Łódź Film School (PWSFTViT), the Academy of Fine Arts (ASP) educating visual artists and fashion designers, or fi nally a vibrant music scene – was what I wanted to present at Kordegarda Project.

This exhibition of the work of Rajmund Ziemski is of a retrospective nature. Its title is Landscape 1953–2005. For over 50 years the artist gave his paintings the title Landscape, embellished usually just with a number and the year. The exhibition recalls the whole of the artist’s oeuvre, showing the many changes in his work, striving always for the best expression of his emotions and fears in the language of painting which he used with a great sense of mastery and freedom. Thus, on show will be paintings from the 50s up until 2005, both the earlier works to whose exquisite effects of colour and texture he owed his popularity, and later works that are much less well-known.

The exhibition is aimed at children spending the holidays in the city. We present works from the Zachęta collection: paintings, sculptures, and videos related to the themes of the city and holidays. The exhibition rooms will transform into something of an “educational playground” in which games will be inspired by the works of the artists on view there, and the exhibition space will merge with a workshop space.

The Summer of Youth, or in Polish Letni nieletni, is an exhibition about young people. About this particular time in a person's life, when the personality is undergoing an intensive process of formation, when feelings and passions are being awoken; when the reality which surrounds us stops being simple, and begins to glisten with a multiplicity of colours, phenomena and thoughts... Youth is a time of strong conflicts, when the need for freedom is just as strong as the need for support, and when from great adventures it is just a small step to big problems. Avoiding simplistic labels and dividing lines, the exhibition The Summer of Youth presents a diverse picture of young people in contemporary Polish art.

For the current exhibition Eva Weinmayr, born in Augsburg and living in London, shows three videos investigating the mysterious vanishing of the English artist collective Art in Ruins. Formed by Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks, Art in Ruins came to international prominence in the 1980’s and 1990’s, provocatively addressing capitalism, discrimination and the art world. After a distinct political phase of activity, Art in Ruins became quiet, a state that they describe as being ‘in limbo’. Weinmayr fills this silence by speculating on the reasons for the withdrawal.

The exhibition presents a key period in the work of Jan Lebenstein: that of the whole decade of the 60s, with special attention to the first “three Parisian winters”: 1959/60, 1960/61 and 1961/62. This is when Lebenstein’s private mythology found its characteristic expression. Up until then it had remained “encoded” in axial figures and “decoded,” but not publicly revealed, in intimate mini sketches and gouaches. This duality of the artist’s creativity was shown for the first time.

The exhibition at the Kordegarda Project in Warsaw is another part of the series Briesen, pursued by Krzysztof Zieliński since 1995. ‘Briesen’ is the pre-1945 name of the artist’s home town of Wąbrzeźno. The whole series is a documentation of a personal experience of Berlin, the artist’s new domicile.  

Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe” is the first comprehensive exhibition featuring art from Eastern Europe since the 1960s based on the theme of gender roles. 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the curator Bojana Pejić, along with a team of experts from 24 different countries, has put together a selection of over 300 works including paintings, sculpture, installations, photography, posters, films and videos. With over 200 artists, the exhibition paints an exceptionally diverse picture of a chapter in art history that until recently had been largely unknown and that could also act as an important addition to contemporary gender discourse.       

The exhibition concentrates only on the problem of the world of animals, exploring artists' diverse takes on this problem and the range of ways of visualizing it in art. The point of entry for the exhibition is the desire to overcome the dogmatic anthropocentrism that places the human in the centre of the world as a privileged species of the highest ontological status. This viewpoint continues to dominate in contemporary science, and as a consequence we witness the exclusion of other species/phenomena of life on earth from the sphere of scientific knowledge in terms of their subjectivity or rights.          

The exhibition Polonia and Other Fables is the first individual show of Allan Sekula’s work in Poland. It links his oldest with his newest works, but it is not a classic retrospective show. It is constructed around two major themes: social engagement and the search for a zone in which the private and personal are linked with the universal and the commonplace.    

This exhibition in Kordegarda – prepared as part of the cycle, Room with a view devoted to urban themes – is the latest presentation by Paweł Borkowski after a break of several years which he devoted to design work. Paweł Borkowski is to be found in Warsaw from time to time, sometimes he lives here for a while, and thus he has retained a freshness of vision which permanent residents of the capital habitually lose. His eye, not dimmed by habit, registers paradoxical situations. However, we have to do justice to the artist in stating that he is willing to turn his ironic optic also on himself. One of the sources of inspiration for the exhibition is the dyslexia that he really suffers from – motifs of dilapidated neons creating linguistic mistakes are intentionally included in the works shown at the exhibition.

Zachęta National Gallery of Art announces a retrospective exhibition of the work of Zbigniew Libera, combined with the publication of a wide-ranging monograph on the artist in English and Polish. The exhibition will be the first such extensive presentation of the artist’s work in Poland and, following his American show (Ann Arbor, 2006), only the second retrospective worldwide of the oeuvre of the author of such works as Lego. Concentration Camp” or Positives.