The BWA Contemporary art gallery

Tuesday, May 19, 2026, 5:30 PM

What does work in culture look like today? What challenges do people working in cultural institutions, NGOs, and informal groups face on a daily basis? What does this work give us, and what does it burn out within us?

We invite you to a workshop dedicated to mapping the experiences of people working and engaging in the field of culture. Together, we will reflect on which aspects of our work remain invisible. The starting point for our discussion will be the words of Stanisław Brzozowski — patron of the Stanisław Brzozowski Association, which runs, among other initiatives, the Krytyka Polityczna Community Center in Cieszyn — “Martyrdom does not replace work” (from the book The Legend of Young Poland, 1909).

We want to treat these words as an invitation to reflect on the contemporary conditions of cultural work: invisible emotional labor, exhaustion, but also solidarity, agency, and the possibilities this work offers us.

During the workshop, we will collectively examine the everyday experiences of people connected to culture — both the difficult and empowering ones. Using methods such as experience mapping and group discussion, we will also create a graphic narrative of our working day aimed at revealing aspects of cultural work that are usually overlooked or trivialized.

The meeting is intended for people working in broadly understood cultural institutions and organizations, artists, people involved in social organizations, grassroots initiatives, and informal communities — including those working outside formal employment structures. It is for everyone who feels their work takes place somewhere between fulfillment and exhaustion, between ant-like labor and a martyr-like impulse.

The workshop will be led by Natalia Kałuża and Joanna Wowrzeczka from the Krytyka Polityczna Community Center in Cieszyn.

Natalia Kałuża — ethnologist, cultural studies scholar, and cultural animator. Coordinator of the Cieszyn edition of the WATCH DOCS Traveling Film Festival: Human Rights in Film. Head of the Krytyka Polityczna Community Center in Cieszyn.

Joanna Wowrzeczka — artist (habilitation in fine arts) and sociologist (PhD in humanities). As a sociologist, she researches the field of art in Poland; as an artist, she focuses on the issue of marginalized groups and public space. Since 1999, she has worked at the Institute of Art of the University of Silesia. Founder of the Krytyka Polityczna Community Center in Cieszyn and co-founder of the contemporary art gallery Szara in Cieszyn, where she served as curator from 2001 to 2005. Since 2018, she has been a member of the Cieszyn City Council (2018–2023 term). In recent years, she has increasingly engaged her artistic practice in diagnosing social reality, focusing on themes related to labor, politics, the city, and exclusion. She is a socially engaged artist. Much of her teaching with students takes place in public space in response to current social issues.

The event is part of the “Futurological Congress” carried out within the framework of the “Aesthetic Congress” — a year-long series of exhibition and performative events aimed at rethinking and updating the formula of the art institution through the engagement of diverse and complementary artistic languages and tools, as well as the participation of artists and curators. The primary point of reference, and at the same time the starting point, is BWA Katowice — an institution embedded in the urban and social fabric of the city as a tool of social engineering. The modernist pavilion, now recognized as an architectural monument, is contemporaneous with the emergence of the Polish wave of institutional critique. The necessity of its spatial and ideological renewal becomes the point of departure for a discourse on the meanings and dynamics of the art institution understood in a universal dimension.