The Museum is open 11:00 – 19:00
Cinema is closed now
The Museum is open 11:00 – 19:00
Cinema is closed now
Author's meeting
Between the Forest and the Factory: Book Launch and Discussion with Magdalena Worłowska
Guests
Magdalena Worłowska, Jakub Depczyński
Location
Auditorium
Language of the meeting
Polish
Admission
Free admission thanks to a partnership with Audi
The Culture of Place Foundation, the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and MSN Publishing invite you to the book launch of Magdalena Worłowska’s “Between the Forest and the Factory: The Neo-Avant-Garde Beginnings of Ecologically Engaged Art, 1959–1981”. The conversation with the author will be moderated by Jakub Depczyński.
“For quite some time now, we have been aware that the flip side of socialist modernization was the degradation of the natural environment. Magdalena Worłowska shows that artists criticized this in various ways, but they also formulated proposals to remedy the situation. They did so ‘between the forest and the factory,’ as well as in lakes, mines, and fields, expanding the existing scope of the neo-avant-garde’s activities. Worłowska’s pioneering synthesis fills—in green—a white spot in research on art in socialist Poland.” – Jakub Banasiak
Magdalena Worłowska shows that ecological reflection appeared in Polish art much earlier than is commonly believed. She analyzes artistic events from the late 1950s to the early 1980s: based on extensive archival research, she examines, among other things, the open-air workshops in Osieki and Łazy and the Wrocław ’70 Art Symposium, as well as the much less well-known activities of artists. The book offers a new perspective on the Polish neo-avant-garde and reveals a little-recognized, yet today particularly relevant, dimension of experimental artistic practices in the People’s Republic of Poland.
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Excerpt from the book:
“In recent years, as the word ‘Anthropocene’ is bandied about in all its forms, a renewed, ecological reading of works from the People’s Republic of Poland era and a mapping of ecologically engaged themes in art created seventy to fifty years ago reveal that although artists at that time did not address the issue of climate change,
which we have only widely recognized in recent years, they were deeply aware of the catastrophic state of our planet and the fact that humans had driven it into that state. Many of the works and actions through which they expressed their concern remain relevant to this day. Through the interdisciplinary perspective of this book, I demonstrate that art evolves alongside the development of science, but I also note that ecology, as a science, benefits from its dialogue with art. In many spheres, it is art that anticipates the debate on various types of relationships occurring within the oikos, including those that are imagined or only just sensed. So perhaps a work on the beginnings of ecologically engaged art in Poland relates, to some extent, to the future?
In 2012, Timothy Morton argued, using poetry as an example—and his theory can easily be extended to the visual arts—that we currently look for messages about race or gender in poems, even though poets have not addressed the topic directly; someday we will get used to reading every poem from an ecological perspective, even if no animal or tree appears in it.
Don’t you get the impression that this is already happening?”
The following people will attend the meeting
Magdalena Worłowska
Jakub Depczyński
This content was translated by DeepL