May 15 – September 13
The 17th edition of the International Graphic Design Festival PLASTER, presented at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń, continues its long-standing exploration of contemporary poster design and visual communication. Running from May 15 to September 13, 2026, the festival brings together artists, designers and typographers from around the world, creating a space where graphic design becomes both a visual language and a form of critical reflection on contemporary culture.
This year’s edition revolves around the idea of “the word” – understood not simply as text, but as a carrier of emotion, identity and collective experience. Across the festival, words function as typography, image and symbolic gesture, revealing how contemporary designers navigate the tensions between communication, emotion and meaning in an increasingly saturated visual environment.
At the centre of the programme is the international post-competition exhibition, presenting selected works by designers from Europe, Asia, North and South America. The exhibition showcases a wide range of approaches to poster design – from minimalist typographic compositions to politically engaged visual statements and highly personal narratives. In many of the works, language becomes both subject and material: fragmented, transformed, reduced or amplified through image.
Alongside the post-competition exhibition, PLASTER presents “17P,” a large-scale exhibition focused on contemporary typography and experimental letter-based design. Bringing together designers from several continents, the exhibition explores the expressive potential of type across different media and formats. Posters, publishing projects, record covers and animated typographic works reveal how typography continues to evolve beyond its functional role, becoming a powerful tool for storytelling, critique and visual experimentation.
An important part of the exhibition is dedicated to animated posters – short looped moving-image forms that extend the traditional understanding of the poster into the digital realm. These works respond to the contemporary conditions of image circulation and screen-based communication, while maintaining the conceptual clarity and immediacy characteristic of poster design.
The festival also features a solo exhibition by Taiwanese designer Goyen Chen, winner of PLASTER 2024 competition. Chen’s work moves between graphic design, symbolic systems and artificial intelligence, examining the relationship between visual communication and contemporary technological culture. His posters combine conceptual precision with reduced visual forms, often exploring the tension between human perception and machine logic.
For nearly two decades, PLASTER has remained one of Poland’s most distinctive events dedicated to graphic design culture, contemporary typography and poster design. Rather than treating the poster as a closed historical form, the festival approaches it as a living medium – capable of responding to social change, technological transformation and the shifting language of contemporary visual experience.