Warsaw’s galleries and artist-run spaces shoulder the role of showing contemporary art that challenges our view of reality rather than ratifying it. This will be evident at the 13th edition of Warsaw Gallery Weekend (WGW) and the concurrent art festival Fringe, where both commercial and not-for-profit spaces will show a range of Polish and international artists and welcome collaborators from cities like Berlin and Kyiv. This year, WGW has expanded its program to include a speed-dating session, poetry readings, a feminist seminar, and mindfulness workshops, alongside performances and concerts. Here are seven exhibitions to see throughout the city.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas
‘Jangare’
Foksal Gallery Foundation
September 28 to November 18, 2023
Representing Poland at the 2022 Venice Biennale, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas merged the grand stories of the historic Palazzo Schifanoia frescoes with her family’s biography. At Foksal Gallery Foundation, the Polish-Romani artist and activist once again melds cultural legacies with her personal identity. Specifically, she reinterprets the figure of the bengoro – a Romani word that loosely translates to ‘little devil’ or ‘imp’ in English and symbolizes misfortune and malice – to create benevolent jangare, a word she invented to describe human-like sculptures reminiscent of protective Romani totems. Cast from stearic wax and charcoal, the sculptures use loaded iconography to counter the prevailing stereotypes around Roma peoples. In ‘Jangare’, Mirga-Tas simultaneously reclaims her history and invites viewers to be part of a world more vibrant and complex than the one defined by nationalistic resentment.
‘Refugees Welcome: Artists for Refugees’
Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw
September 29 to December 10, 2023
Both an exhibition and accompanying auction, ‘Refugees Welcome: Artists for Refugees’ raises funds and awareness for immigrants and refugees who are building new lives in Poland. This year, for the seventh iteration of the event, over 70 artists donated their work in a display of empathy. Instead of grouping the works in thematic or chronological clusters, curator Szymon Maliborski mixes media and narratives to bring the gesture of solidarity to the fore. Standout pieces include Bartek Arobal Kociemba’s pencil drawings depicting human-floral hybrids, Monika Chlebek’s painted portraits of animals, and Monika Drożyńska’s subversive embroideries.
Tomasz Kowalski
‘Lalka’
Dawid Radziszewski
September 28 to October 28, 2023
A pioneer of the revival of Surrealism in Polish painting, Tomasz Kowalski explores the theater of the everyday, excavating the faint traces of the eerie that so often lurk beneath the seemingly mundane. Painting atop a variety of textiles, including linen, canvas, and jute, the artist places his protagonists in vast yet restrictive scenes. Figures peek out from behind curtains, newspapers, doors, and windows; their faces reflected, refracted, and multiplied. For Kowalski, a painting is primarily a vehicle to travel simultaneously outside and within oneself. And indeed, after an initial admiration of his compositions, rather than wondering about the narrative details of the curious scenes, viewers begin to reflect on who they are themselves.
Wojciech Bąkowski
‘A Couple of Details’
Stereo
September 28 to November 10, 2023
As a lucid dreamer, Wojciech Bąkowski chronicles his travels to the liminal state between the dreaming and waking worlds through visual art, poetry, and music. For ‘A Couple of Details’, he fabricates a universe derived from his past and present experiences, yet it is one governed by an uncanny logic; one where illusion and fact carry equal epistemological gravitas. In the charcoal-on-cardboard triptych Start of Lamps (2022–23), for example, Bąkowski depicts the same scene three times, each time from a different vantage – and perhaps temporal – point. A dog on a leash jumps at a biker; a person holds a long rod, maybe a sword, casting an imposing shadow; a mysterious onlooker sits by a table. Beyond the mix of characters, the perspective also gradually zooms out to reveal an urban landscape, placing scale into question and adding a dissociative, kaleidoscopic quality to one’s presumed understanding of their surroundings.
‘WARSAW>KIN<BERLIN’
Galeria Promocyjna
September 28 to October 28, 2023
Located in one of Warsaw’s Old Town tenement houses, Galeria Promocyjna is hosting ‘WARSAW>KIN<BERLIN’, the second chapter of a cooperation between independent artist-run spaces in Warsaw and Berlin. Initiated and curated by Katie Zazenski of Warsaw’s Stroboskop and Elisabeth Sonneck of Berlin’s super bien!, the initiative brings together participants from 12 spaces in both capitals to reflect on the meaning of kinship and autonomy in today’s arts ecosystem. The exhibition will feature, among much else, a painting-assemblage by Piotr Bury Łakomy, invited by JIL; a selection of books on speculative design from Fundacja Ziemniaki i’s ‘Potato Library’ project; and a video by Jonas Brinker about human-animal covenants presented by Die Möglichkeit einer Insel. Proposing new exhibition models, the show celebrates adaptability, possibility, and, most importantly, hope.
Janek Simon
‘Sixteenth World’
Raster
September 28 to November 10, 2023
Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s collaborative album Fourth World, Vol. I: Possible Musics (1980) combined analog and electronic instruments to create unified and timeless melodies. Referencing the process used to craft Fourth World, Polish artist Janek Simon applied a similar method for his ‘Meta Folklore’ (2021–23) series of sculptures, a selection of which are on view in this exhibition. Simon fed a self-programmed neural network with thousands of folkloric images of the human figure and then commanded it to generate a series of standardized anthropomorphic portraits. The resulting AI-generated, two-dimensional images were then re-rendered by Simon and pulled out of the digital realm through a 3D printer, resulting in colorful, multi-legged statues – monuments to human culture fossilized in plastic. Combining mechanized and manual processes, Simon questions the distinctions between the two, tirelessly searching for ways in which man and machine creativity can coexist.
‘Hyphenated – Words as the Fabric of Art’
Muzeum Literatury
Through December 31, 2023
At the Muzeum Literatury (Museum of Literature), curators Anna Lebensztejn and Karolina Vyšata present a range of works, from the avant-garde to the contemporary, that explore the many stages of a word’s existence – from an idea to a written sign to, finally, a memory. Works by artists such as Erna Rosenstein and Ewa Partum investigate how multitudinous meanings are reduced to a static combination of letters. In contrast to the weightlessness of digital communication, ‘Hyphenated – Words as the Fabric of Art’ emphasizes the material qualities, gestural aspects, and consequences of the word. In a physical extension of this idea, the works on view freely inhabit the museum’s interiors: some cling to the ceiling, some sprawl across the floor, and others latch on to windowpanes.
Ewa Borysiewicz writes about art, organizes exhibitions, and makes ceramics. She lives and works in Warsaw and Basel.
Published on September 27, 2023.
Caption for full-bleed image: Tomasz Kowalski, TBT, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Dawid Radziszewski.