- post-residence exhibition

The power of words in different contexts, languages, images and sounds – from November 10, the BWA Wrocław Główny gallery will host an exhibition that is the creative voice of women artists living in Norway and Poland. The exhibition is a summary of the residency stays of female artists working on the other side of the Baltic Sea, who have visited Wroclaw in recent months – and one who has traveled in the opposite direction.

Everything most important happened outside the space of this exhibition.
– Agata Ciastoń, curator

This sentence well describes the presentation at the BWA Wrocław Główny gallery of the effects of the residency stays of six artists, which took place in the spring and summer of this year as part of the Polish-Norwegian program “Whose voices are being heard?”. The artists took up residence in their new surroundings for a while. It became a place for them to ask questions, create, have conversations, emotions and doubts. It was a very intense time, escaping attempts to encapsulate it in the rigid architectural and temporal framework of the exhibition. It’s hard to capture the variety of shared experiences and events in the projects created during this time alone. They are important, but one of many results of processes begun a few months ago. The exhibition, on the other hand, is only a variant of a multi-voiced story. 

Persons who were invited to participate in the project experienced a number of difficult moments in their lives, and their artistic paths were sometimes winding. Many times they never got a chance to participate in a residency before, some of them in the flurry of daily duties did not find opportunities to realize their ideas. The residencies therefore became a special event, allowing them to devote themselves entirely to artistic practice, an opportunity to redirect their attention to the creative process. Kine Michelle Bruniera, Lill Yildiz Yalcin, Aliona Pazdniakova, Yachi Shian-Yuan Yang, Ingrid Frivold are artists living in Norway who spent a month in Wroclaw, while Viktoriia Tofan made a reverse trip and went from Wroclaw to the small Norwegian town of Hvitsten for four weeks. The works of all of them will be included in the exhibition, and will include photography, objects, painting, as well as video and sound composition.

The presentation is the voices of female artists with unique experiences and skills. Starting from a meeting in the circumstances of an artistic residency, it emphasises understanding how others think, process information, perceive the world and make decisions – on cognitive diversity. The works are united by sharpness and freshness of outlook, some are even a kind of manifesto in response to church or state interference in private life or the energy crisis. The artists, speaking from their positions as representatives of a minority group, call for inquisitiveness, the courage to, as Donna Harway wants, destabilize worlds of thought with other worlds of thought.

The exhibition is the finale of the project under the same name which has been ongoing since mid-2022. – implemented by the Wrocław Institute of Culture together with the Norwegian organizations, Hvitsten Salong and Safemuse. Its activities were aimed at equalising the opportunities and visibility of artists and creating safe and inclusive spaces for creative work. 160 people from Poland and Norway applied to participate in the project. From these, 12 artistic people were selected to take part in residency stays in 2023 in Wrocław and Hvitsten.

The exhibition opening will take place on November 10 at 6 p.m. in the BWA Wrocław Główny Gallery located on the mezzanine of the Wrocław Central Railway Station (105 Piłsudskiego Street). Admission is and visiting the exhibition is free. The exposition will be open until the end of 2023. 

Program of curatorial tours and accompanying events:

• 10.11.2023, 6:00 pm | Exhibition opening
• 15.11.2023, 5:00 pm | Curatorial tour with Agata Ciastoń (in Polish)
• 23.11.2023, 6:00 pm | Discussion “Artist, is it a profession? Can you make a living from creative work?”with Yuriy Biley, Gerard Lebik, Małgorzata Miłoszewska, Paulina Maloy, Liliana Zaic
• 02.12.2023, 5:00 pm | Guided tour in English with Paulina Maloy
• 05.12.2023, 5:00 pm | „How does the art community and market work in Poland?” – lecture by Katarzyna Młyńczak-Sachs (Barbara, Świdnicka 8b)
• 16.12.2023, 5:00 pm | Curatorial tour with Agata Ciastoń with Polish Sign Language translation

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