Current and announcement
New Topographies — Urban Structures and Narrative Spaces
Simone Rueß — artist residency
Working with social memory, the artist will conduct a series of artistic and research-based activities focused on the individual and collective memory of the institution. These activities will be developed through conversations with people connected to BWA Katowice (both contemporary and historical), including its employees. The artist will create mental maps of her interlocutors. The meetings will become an opportunity to share stories about the individual memory of BWA Katowice. Together, we will map relationships with space over time, the experience of art, and the evolution of community-based and institutional relations.
The project inaugurates the AESTHETIC CONGRESS program — a year-long exhibition and performative program aimed at updating the formula of the art institution. It is carried out through the engagement of diverse, complementary artistic languages and tools, and with 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 center of the city’s urban and social fabric as a tool of social engineering. The modernist pavilion, now recognized as a historical monument, is contemporaneous with the emergence of the Polish wave of institutional critique. The need for its spatial and conceptual updating becomes the starting point for a broader discourse on the meanings and dynamics of the art institution understood in a universal dimension.
For the duration of the project, the main exhibition space will transform into a year-round art laboratory. Historical works will enter into dialogue with entirely new ones, forming a collective reflection.