PROSTHESES AND CLOUDS + INSTITUTIONS AND INFRASTRUCTURES
An exhibition, a workshop, and an international symposium in Szczecin
The exhibition "Portals and Clouds" (19.11–4.12.2026, Zone of Contemporary Art) and its accompanying symposium ‘Institutions and Infrastructures: Relational Practices in Unsettled Times’ (28–29.11.2026, TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art), “Soft Skills For Hard Times” workshops (22.11.2026) at the Black Hall (Czarna Sala) of the Academy of Art in Szczecin — serving as an introduction to the symposium; and a Lecture by Elke Krasny on December 4, 2026, at TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin invite to a space of shared reflection on curating and art in times of crisis.
The event aims to explore curatorial and artistic practices and processes grounded in alliance-building and the construction of support infrastructures in turbulent times. Points of reference for the gathering include the tradition of emancipatory curating, as well as apartment exhibitions (Apt-Art) under real socialism and contemporary discourses on accessibility politics. In difficult times, creative people have often turned to private resources, generating discourse outside official, institutional, and/or commercial circulation. The groundbreaking feminist art exhibition ‘Womanhouse’ began as a student experiment; Ilya Kabakov, before becoming an art-world celebrity, presented his illustrated narratives in friends' apartments; and during the transformation period, critical artists met in Katarzyna Kozyra's kitchen. Today, artists in war-torn Ukraine rely on private infrastructures.
Amid increasingly drastic cuts to culture budgets, driven by global threats, defense policy, and local backlashes, it is worth turning to the practices used in past moments of crisis. Knowledge of how to ‘get by’ amid underfunding and marginalization is passed down through methods developed by caregivers, disabled people, neurodivergent people, migrants, and members of ethnic minorities. Those excluded from the paradigm of independence and self-sufficiency have always lived in a state of crisis. Their diasporic strategies contain concrete practices of survival and the building of solidarity networks. Before these practices become preserved as folklore, it is worth universalizing them so they can become points of reference for societies in crisis. Turning our gaze toward local, marginalized, and personal actions may chart new ‘lines of flight’, helping to shift entrenched patterns based on competition, hyper-efficiency, and accumulation toward sensitive co-existence and what Donna Haraway calls ‘staying with the trouble’.
In an era marked by multiple crises — ecological, social, and now the stark reality of war — curatorial and artistic strategies, as well as ways of working in culture, must also change. The international symposium in Szczecin will discuss the roles of cultural workers as mediators, witnesses, and allies. These relational modes of working aim to decentralize professional identity, opening it up to participatory, genuinely democratic practices and to more-than-human experience. In this conception, curating becomes an intersectional act, one that takes political and ecological threats into account and seeks ways of ‘coping’ with crises to which the field of art is not — yet — immune.
Concept and organization: Marian Gogut, Kot, Zofia Kuligowska, Zofia Nierodzińska, Grażyna Siedlecka
Participants: Anna Adamowicz, Sascia Bailer, Anna Bielawska, Karolina Breguła, Marian Gogut, Sophie Hutchinson, Łukasz Jastrubczak, Anna Maria Karczmarska + Mikołaj Małek, Andrei Kharchanka, Nastia Khlestova, Katharina Koch, Kot, Ana Kulak, Mateusz Kowalczyk, Zofia Kuligowska, Paweł Leszkowicz, Justyna Lipko-Konieczna, Karolina Majewska-Güde, Frances McCormack, Zofia nierodzińska, Alicja Pawluczuk, Martyna Pilarczuk & Maria Madziewska, Nina Prader, Aneta Rostkowska, Sylvia Sadzinski, Grażyna Siedlecka.
Organizer: Academy of Art in Szczecin
Partner: TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin
Event co-financed by the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation
The full schedule and details regarding all project events can be found in the Facebook event.