Collection

The KwieKulik Archive is the largest private archive of material concerning avant-garde art and visual culture from the Polish Communist era. KwieKulik systematically documented the work of avant-garde artists in the 1970s and 1980s as a response to the lack of interest from official cultural institutions. Over the years, this archive (or “bank of aesthetic time results”) which they were compiling in their private flat grew to include tens of thousands of photographs and slides, thousands of prints, magazines, and hundreds of films. Apart from documenting ephemeral art of the 1970s and 1980s (including unique recordings of Oskar Hansen, Zbigniew Libera, the Film Form Workshop, the EL Gallery, and Jiří Kovanda), the KwieKulik Archive also contains priceless material describing how institutions responsible for culture and propaganda used to operate in the People’s Republic of Poland. Meticulously catalogued correspondence between artists and institutions, official bulletins, and magazines give a unique picture of the schizophrenic way in which culture functioned within the socialist state.

As part of the Museum collection exhibition, we have reconstructed the interior of the Studio of Activities, Documentation and Propagation which used to operate from Kwiek and Kulik’s flat in Warsaw’s Praga district in the 1970s. The SADP was the first incarnation of the KwieKulik Archive.