As You Can See.
Debate about Polish art now
The debate about Polish actual art will take place on Friday 25th of April in the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The discussion will be held by the curators of "As you can see" exhibition and invited guests.
The session is a response to the vivid discussion focused around the exhibition entitled: “As You Can See. Polish Art Today”, which polarised the artistic circles and revealed the fundamental change that occurred in Polish art.
What did we learn about artistic stage, criticism and audience through the “As You Can See” exhibition? Do we need a cyclic review of Polish art? What changed in art in the last decade and why not everyone is willing to discern it? Does Polish art need a new language to be described by? We invite several people to join in the discussion – artists, curators, critics, gallery owners and theoreticians, including: Jan Sowa, Ewa Majewska, Jakub Szreder, Ewa Tatar, Adam Mazur, Jakub Banasiak, Józef Robakowski, Tymek Borowski and Dorota Jarecka. The exhibition is moderated by curators of the “As You Can See” exhibition, Sebastian Cichocki and Łukasz Ronduda.
Subjects – inquiries to be addressed during individual sessions:
A. CRISIS OF INDEPENDENT INSTITUTIONS
What stands behind the twilight of the artist-run gallery? Are there artists interested in the continuation or reformation of the model? How is the decline of artists-run spaces affected by the market? Where is the institutional energy to be searched for?
B. CONSERVATIVE TURN?
Has Polish art become bourgeois and conservative? How would the conservative turnabout of the culture manifest itself: in a move away from committed attitudes, in weakened relations with the avant-garde, in the return to plastic arts or in the strengthening of the market?
C. CRITICAL ART OR POLITICAL VIVIDNESS?
What has become of the heritage of critical art? What are the new forms of commitment? Have critical strategies been reformulated or have they vanished? Discussion on the emergence of new committed formalism.
D. AVANT-GARDE EXHAUSTION
Has the end come for historiography? How do artists address the past, how do they manipulate and appropriate the past? Who wants the avant-garde masters to die?