We woke up amidst the ruins. Such is the state of affairs communicated today by artists, curators and academics. In the eight years of backlash under the right-wing ultra-conservative government in Poland, it took not only considerable civic courage but also the ability to seek support outside the system to engage with the theories and practices of contemporary art movements and to participate in the co-creation of an expanded, critical cultural reality with a glocal character – one that encompasses the world of human and non-human beings. Contemporary art and critical theories have essentially been relegated to the margins of cultural and artistic institutions…

Philosophy has for too long been regarded art as a threat, not only to itself, but above all to the vision of unambiguous reality and the classical definition of truth it has espoused (the necessary conformity of things to concepts). Idealistically inclined philosophers have often seen in works of art sources of falsehood, illusion and pretence – introducing dangerous chaos into the ordered structures of disembodied intellectual systems (hence Plato’s banishment of poets from his ideal state). For centuries, the only conceivable alliance between philosophy and art was to acknowledge the latter’s subservient role (ars ancilla philosophiae) and to regard works of art as imperfect – because material – bearers of ephemeral but universal and timeless ideas (sites of truth, according to Martin Heidegger)