Body - media - power. Visual arts in Poland and Russia after 1991.

We would like to invite you to a discussion on contemporary art in comparative terms. We will talk about both Poland and Russia, and we invited to join us people who have been actively creating the visual arts landscape for years. Two curators, Natalia Gonczarova (The National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Moscow) and Ewa Gorządek (Centre for Contemporary Art U-Jazdowski), will present visual arts in perspective of Moscow and Warsaw. We want to find out what topics were raised by Polish and Russian artists in similar times and similar socio-political conditions. The period of the turn of the 1980s and 1990s will be a starting point for the reflection. We will discuss the situation in which artists found themselves after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The drift from political and current subjects towards corporality in the biological and cultural dimension was characteristic for the visual arts in Poland in the 1990s. Did it also take place in Russia? Was the subject of new media, capitalism and growing consumerism equally important beyond our eastern border? How did artists relate to cultural and social taboos? Was the relationship with the Church as an institution, or more broadly with religion, reflected in their art? We would also like to ask the speakers how contemporary art is perceived today. To what extent are Poles and Russians interested in it, how do they react to the subversive strategies commonly used by artists and, like in Poland, can an exhibition in Russia also become the object of a broad social discussion that often evokes extreme emotions?

NOTES ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Natalia Gonczarova – art historian, curator of contemporary art exhibitions, Head of Exhibition Department the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Moscow (http://www.ncca.ru/), researcher of performance art in Poland and Russia, currently a scholarship holder of the Centre for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding.

Ewa Gorządek – art historian, head of the Visual Arts Programme at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, where she has been working since 1985. Curator of many individual and group exhibitions of Polish and foreign artists. Art critic (Obieg, Magazyn Sztuki, Exit), author of texts for catalogues, biographical notes for the Słownik Malarzy Polskich [Dictionary of Polish Painters] (Arkady) and short biographies for Culture.pl website.

Iwo Zmyślony – studied philosophy and art history at the University of Warsaw, Catholic University of Lublin, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. His PhD thesis concerns creativity in empirical sciences (2013). Author of several scientific publications on expert knowledge (know-how, tacit knowledge, embodied knowledge) and several dozen texts on contemporary art. Graduate of the Academy of Social Innovators Ashoka Innovators for the Public and local government programme of the Academy of Humanities in Pułtusk. Winner of grants and scholarships (e.g. NCN, DAAD, GFPS, "Młoda Polska" [Young Poland]). He conducts research in the field of contemporary art, image hermeneutics, psychology of creativity, service design, design thinking and anthropology of design and new technologies.