Wrocław Contemporary Museum – year summary and plans for 2016
Twenty-three exhibitions, including four large ones in the main exhibition galleries, eight concept
shows, seven smaller projects, two interactive exhibitions and MWW’s first ever travelling exhibition;
seventy events held as part of the public programme and several dozen workshops conducted by the
educational section – all this for almost 35,000 people who visited MWW in 2015, and another
30,000 participants in events organised by MWW outside its seat.
Over the past year, we showed a total of 23 exhibitions at MWW. The galleries on the main two
exhibition floors hosted four large exhibitions: The Germans Did Not Come (curated by Michał
Bieniek, ECoC Wrocław 2016 curator of the visual arts), Soft Codes. Conceptual Tendencies in Slovak
Art (curated by Vladimir Beskid, ECoC Kosice 2013 programme curator), Vot Ken You Mach? (curated
by Rafał Jakubowicz and Dorota Monkiewicz, exhibition prepared in cooperation with Kunsthaus
Dresden) and New Art for New Society (curated by Jasna Jaksić and Ivana Kancir, exhibition prepared
in cooperation with Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosci Zagreb).
On the fifth floor, we showed five concept exhibitions: Tomasz Broda’s From Roobens to Pikaso,
Elżbieta Janicka and Wojciech Wilczyk’s Other City, Roots & Fruits (as part of the 5th edition of the
TIFF Festival), and Laureana Toledo and Dr. Lakra’s PUNXDEFEKTUOZOZ. The space on the ground
floor was the venue for five projects: In Progress. Media Art in the DTZSP Collection, Agnieszka
Brzeżańska’s Ma Terra, Daniel Malone’s Unidentified Artistic Objects in the Age of Current Art, Vlado
Martek’s Boundaries of Language, and there is / there isn’t. Works from the DTZSP Collection.
Another seven projects were shown, as part of the MWW Public Programme, in the so-called small
gallery near the lift on level 0.
As part of the visual arts programme of ECoC 2016, we began the monumental project The Wild
West. A History of Wrocław’s Avant-garde. The travelling exhibition was first shown at the Zachęta
National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, where it was enthusiastically received by the audience, media and
critics. The second presentation of the exhibition took place in Kosice, Slovakia – European Capital of
Culture 2013. Within the next two years, the exhibition will be shown in Kunstmuseum Bochum,
Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosci Zagreb and Ludwig Múzeum Budapest.
The second floor of the shelter is reserved for the Self-service Museum – an interactive space that
has for years been designed by Wrocław artist Patrycja Mastej in cooperation with Magdalena
Skowrońska, the curator of the educational programme. This year, two interactive exhibitions were
shown in the Self-service Museum – Externalizer and In the Earth. The latter can be visited, free of
charge, during the museum’s opening hours until the end of August 2016.
As part of the Public Programme, curated by Bartek Lis, more than 70 events were prepared,
including debates, lectures, film screenings, discussions, concerts and workshops. By November
2015, almost 3,000 people had participated in them. Among the invited guests were: Zuzana
Bartošova, Rafał Betlejewski, Rafał Eysymontt, Michael Joyce, Jacqueline Nicholls, Ewa Rewers, Ami
Steinitz, Aneta Szyłak, Renata Tańczuk and Ewa Tatar. An important part of the programme was
connected with the lectures and debates on memory and identity of place, which accompanied The
German Did Not Come exhibition, and on the Jewish identity in Europe after the Holocaust, which
accompanied the Vot Ken You Mach? exhibition.
The past year was also a year of experiments with the museum space. As a result, a cinema room was
created on the first floor (the “Cinema in the Shelter” cycle), which in the summer is moved to the
roof. This is also where we celebrated MWW’s fourth birthday, held the “Cinema on the Roof” cycle
(film screenings accompanying the Vot Ken You Mach? exhibition), and “WNIEBO” (a DJ-ing
marathon), which also served as an introduction to the “Civilization of the After” series of discussions
in the autumn. It was these discussions about the clubbing milieu, the summer “Cinema on the Roof”
cycle, as well as the discussion series “Anatomy of Tower Blocks” and “VOID_studio”, carried out in
cooperation with Wrocław Film Foundation, that attracted the greatest numbers of visitors.
Moreover, since the beginning of its existence, Wrocław Contemporary Museum has been running
an original educational programme for children, teenagers and adults, supervised by curator
Magdalena Skowrońska. The programme has been financially supported by the Ministry of Culture
and National Heritage and is always connected with exhibitions that are currently on show. It
comprises the following events: Sunday Family Workshops (44 meetings held in the past year),
workshops for schools and organised groups, “Practice Art” – a series of workshops for teenagers
concerning peer art mediation, tours of exhibitions under the motto “Exhibition Starter in Motion”,
and various other events. By the end of November 2015, more than 4,000 people used MWW’s
educational offer.
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In the approaching year 2016, the year of European Capital of Culture, MWW will focus on its
fundamental task – making its collection available to the visitors. To prepare for this, the main
galleries on levels 3 and 4 will undergo a complete overhaul in the next few months. After it is over,
we will show the exhibition Employment Relationships, curated by Sylwia Serafinowicz.
Taking as its starting point the most important phenomena and achievements in Polish art, the
programmatic line of MWW collection, which has been assembled since 2011, is consistently
broadened to include the international context. The collection is intended to not only reflect the key
phenomena in the visual arts of the last few decades, but to take a stance on today’s most urgent
problems: building personal and national identity, protecting the national heritage, analysing social
conflicts and capital flows. The Employment Relationships exhibition will mostly feature works by
foreign artist that were purchased for the MWW collection.
Additional context for Employment Relationships will be provided by temporary exhibitions shown on
other floors, including a presentation of Pola Dwurnik’s drawings, Marlena Kudlicka’s spatial
installations, a review of Belarusian contemporary art, and the Silence of the Sounds project, which
addresses the paradox of silence. We will also host an external exhibition titled Following Jerzy
Grotowski in Jan Krzysztof Fiołek’s Photographs, and in the early September we will again welcome
the TIFF Festival. Around the middle of 2016, we will also present the documentation of
experimental transformational actions which Artur Żmijewski and Adam Mazur, accompanied by a
group of foreign artists, will carry out among MWW employees.
We are going to consistently explore the margins and contexts of art, focus on social issues and
describe the local space where we function. In mid-January, the second edition of “Cinema in the
Shelter” will begin as part of the Public Programme in cooperation with Wrocław Film Foundation.
This time, crampedness will be our leitmotiv – in various dimensions of claustrophobia and
limitations. The selected films will become a starting point for discussions about cramped conditions
perceived literally as well as in the context of limitations imposed by the authorities and disabilities
carrying physical, verbal and communicational limitations. A reflection on the space of the Museumshelter will be indispensable here – increasingly often, the venue turns out to be inadequate for our
numerous ideas. Instead of making our functioning easier, it becomes a source of obstacles
connected with showing and storing the collection.
When spring comes, we are planning to launch three new series of meetings, workshops, lectures
and discussions as part of the Public Programme. Community, stupid! is a series during which the
invited guests and us will think whether, and to what degree, culture can become a tool of social
revitalization, and what capital and potential is hidden in people and in the local community. Identity
will explore the identity of today’s Wrocław dwellers. We will discuss whether there is anything
unique about us, if this uniqueness can be specified and named, if our egos shape the here and now,
or perhaps are rooted in previous generations. What is the identity of Wrocław dwellers if almost all
of them came from other places? Finally, the Young Wrocław. NOW! cycle will expand the On the
Agenda… project, which has been carried out at MWW in recent years. It will provide the time and
space for those young at heart, those who have interesting ideas to share with others and
implement.
MWW’s educational section is planning to continue its successful projects in 2016. Work is also being
carried out on an innovative project Space for Education = Space for Culture, which will be addressed
to students and teachers. Prepared in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, the
Faculty of Psychology of Wrocław University and Tekturowo, the project will contribute new quality
in the artistic and cultural education of children, teenagers and adults.
In the approaching year, Wrocław Contemporary Museum will be open to visitors on some public
holidays: on Sunday, May 15 (Pentecost), on Monday, August 15 (Polish Army Day), and on Saturday,
November 11 (Independence Day). On these days, visitors will be able to not only see the permanent
and temporary exhibitions, but also to participate in special events prepared by the MWW team on
these occasions. At the end of summer holiday, at the turn of August and September, we are
planning to hold a weekend full attractions, just like in the previous year, which will become a
permanent element of MWW calendar.