Though it operates under the label of “Art Space”, even that term feels too constrained. WL4 blurs the boundary between artistic practice and the space it inhabits. In places like this, art doesn’t simply exist within space; rather, both are co-produced through presence, use, and interaction.
This year marks a decade since a group of artists decided to take over a vacant industrial building, a former bakery at Wiosny Ludów 4 in Gdańsk, and transform it into a site of a collective artistic environment. What began as a practical need for studios quickly evolved into a living, grassroots organism: self-organised, constantly in motion. WL4 didn’t just fill a gap in infrastructure. It proposed an alternative model, one based on shared space, shared risk, and a shared sense of responsibility, shaped by common purpose and mutual care.
“It was euphoric”, remembers Adriana Majdzińska, sculptor and co-founder of WL4. “The lease was signed in early June 2015, and by July, most of the studios were already taken. Word spread fast across the Tri-City. Everyone was building, painting, and adapting their spaces. But not everyone could get in – the rule was simple: you had to be actively creating”.
WL4 is one of those places that undermines traditional display protocols. It resists the assumption that art needs white walls, calibrated lighting, and visual neutrality.
The building posed physical challenges. Yet what it offered was something essential: potential, and the absence of predetermined function. “One large room on the ground floor, in what had been the hall with a giant steam bread oven, was perfect for a gallery – we just had to clear a meter-high layer of rubble”. WL4 is one of those places that undermines traditional display protocols. It resists the assumption that art needs white walls, calibrated lighting, and visual neutrality. When the artists moved into Mleczny Piotr, a building on the site of the former Imperial Shipyard with no electricity, heating, or infrastructure, everything was in disrepair. And yet, what emerged felt deeply integrated, shaped by the site’s rawness, its history, and its constraints.
That embedded awareness is foundational to WL4. Like much of the post-shipyard terrain, Mleczny Piotr carries material traces of past labour, political shifts, collapse, and takeover. WL4 does not try to erase or overwrite this history. It adds a new layer, opening up the question of what else a space might become. The artists did not neutralise or sanitise the building. Instead, they treated it as a collaborator. This allowed them to preserve the character of the site while developing practices that stay socially rooted and porous.
Communities like WL4 ask what art can mean in a social sense. Art needs witnesses and relations. It cannot exist only as an object. What happens if we understand art as fundamentally contextual, bound to time and place? What is an art space? A space for art? A space with art? Art as space? At WL4, art occupies the whole terrain. Under a historic crane, a stage was built. The sculptures by Czesław Podleśny, Castaways, appear to rise out of the sea onto the artistic grounds. WL4 not only display art; it co-creates it, together with the space, the audience, the rhythms of work, and the life of the city. This mode of practice calls for a different way of thinking. It avoids top-down structures, instead cultivating emergent forms of organisation.
The absence of hierarchy does not mean disorder. It is precisely the diversity of backgrounds, approaches, and temperaments that gave rise to a set of informal but effective rules. These remain flexible enough to adapt to changing spatial, social, and economic conditions. “Working with a group of strong individuals is never easy”, Majdzińska admits. “There are tensions, clashes, emotions”. But it’s precisely this difficulty, and the commitment to moving through it together, that shaped what today can be seen as a micro-institution in its own right. WL4 is more than an address or a venue. Rather, it functions as a living organism that is shaped by co-responsibility, openness, and a belief in active ties to its community. “Egalitarianism matters to us. We want art to be accessible to as many people as possible. Entry is always free, to help reduce barriers to culture”, she adds.
And it raises a broader question: what do we consider a usable space? What possibilities lie within the so-called empty, leftover, forgotten places? WL4 demonstrates that such “emptiness” is full of possibility. What lacks a predetermined function can become a ground for reinvention. In Mleczny Piotr, a site without electricity, heating, or formal infrastructure, artists carved out studios, exhibition spaces, a stage, a cinema, workshops, and forums for dialogue. The space has since hosted exhibitions that speak directly to urgent cultural and political moments, including Art of Protest (2024), On Violence (2022), Digital Art (2022/2023), and Eros (2022).
WL4 is more than an address or a venue. Rather, it functions as a living organism that is shaped by co-responsibility, openness, and a belief in active ties to its community.
WL4 has always remained in active dialogue with the world around it – a dialogue that includes difficult, often political terrain, but also transcends geographic borders. Over the years, the space has cultivated collaborations with like-minded collectives such as Kling & Bang (Reykjavík), PB43 (Copenhagen), Instytut Avtomatyky (Kyiv), and The Protest Art Studio (Lagos). Through joint projects, residencies, and exhibitions, WL4 is shaping a network of translocal artistic solidarity – one rooted in reciprocity, independence, and mutual recognition.
At WL4, space has become relational. It is a site of exchange, experiment, continuity, resisting aesthetic smoothing, and refusing to erase what is difficult, fractured, or raw in the precarity of artistic practice. Ten years of WL4 is more than an anniversary. It is living evidence that art can grow where no one expected it to. And that space, if not locked into a definition, can stretch to meet the needs of imagination, community, and action, redefining what an art institution can be.
The opening of the anniversary group exhibition of artists connected to WL4 takes place on July 25, 2025, at 7 pm.
