Readings for Artworkmen is a series of seminars at the Free/Slow University of Warsaw based on the principles of self-organization, parallel exchange of knowledge and intensive participation of artists, intellectuals, cultural activists and theoreticians of culture as well as members of many other disciplines.This time we will have an opportunity to read and debate on the first Polish translation of the renowned text by Henri Lefebvre The Right to the City.
On the occasion of the 221st anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution, also called the Great, we invite you for a journey around the inconsistencies of the late capitalism with texts by Henri Lefebvre and Gyorgy Lukacs in our pockets. Although the weather, and also the political situation, would rather encourage a practical realisation of the apotheosis of idleness, we – putting the bourgeois principle of self-moderation into practice – will embark on reconstructing urban utopias, critical theory and romantic love.

Right to the city – as Lefebvre claims – is the right to the city of its inhabitants. Not contemporary “Olympians” – the ruling class, who don’t live anywhere anymore, as constant mobility has become their life practice, but the proletariat – forced to live where they can – people confined to their place of residence, relocated conforming to fashion, settled outside the city centre and crowded in houses that enable “survival”, but not real life.

“Urban air emancipates” Marx claimed, and it might be worth pondering what it means nowadays. Are we still seduced by Lefebvre’s resentment-free, vital and materialistic suggestions? How does the right to the city sound today and what does the division into the master class and the proletariat mean in the era of the galloping postmodern? We will ask these and other questions at the Knot in Praga.

Host: Ewa Majewska; Special guests: Łukasz Stanek and Maciej Czeredys

SUGGESTED READINGS: H. Lefebvre, Right to the City, 1967; H. Lefebvre, Civil society, 1986; polish translation of the fragment of the text by Lefebvre Le retour de la dialèctique, 12 mots clefs pour le monde moderne, Paris 1986

Time: 2010-07-13, at 18:30
Venue: The Knot in Praga Północ, Warsaw: Garden of the Konopacki Palace, Strzelecka St 11/13, Środkowa St junction; the nearest tram stops: Konopacka St - line 32; Inżynierska St - lines 3, 23, 25, 32

FUW Curator: Kuba Szreder
FUW Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

FUW 2010 operates with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

The Free / Slow University of Warsaw, hosted by the KNOT, kindly invites everyone to joint planning of the next congress of independent culture Swoją Drogą 2 (In its own right 2), which is due to take place in December 2010.

There is one goal for the participants and potential collaborators – during the barcamp we want to find the answer to the question: how to organise an alternative cultural congress with modest means and limited resources. Enthusiasm is pivotal for that matter, but is it enough? Find out yourself!

The starting point programme proposal for the December summit stipulates further common reflection upon the neoliberal transformation of public sphere in Poland. This time, we suggest broadening the scope of reflection: we want to merge critical consideration in the field of cultural production with investigation of transformations in the domain of science and university education (the so-called Bologna Process, reform of scientific research funding mechanisms, changes in grant distribution scheme, new methods of managing scientific-teaching personnel, etc.). Both fields are currently subject to similar neoliberal formatting and disciplining. By combining reflection on these two domains - many of us are involved in both of them at the very same time - we stand a better chance of formulating a proper diagnosis of the present situation and elaborating mechanisms of resistance against neoliberal hegemony.

PARTICIPATION
Refund of travel and accommodation costs for non-Warsaw participants is available. Funds limited, please apply immediately at: szymon@funbec.eu

OUR WAY, BY THE WAY FOREPLAY
Barcamp of the FUW in The Knot
time: 07.11, Sunday, 12.00-16.00
venue: The Knot in Praga Północ, Warsaw: Garden of the Konopacki Palace, Strzelecka St 11/13, Środkowa St junction; the nearest tram stops: Konopacka St - line 32; Inżynierska St - lines 3, 23, 25, 32

FUW Curator: Kuba Szreder
FUW Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation,
www.wuw2010.pl

FUW 2010 operates with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

The exhibition Weird evokes conspiracy theories, mysterious phenomena and their descriptions existing in popular circulation of information, the so-called common knowledge. Unexplained occurrences, catastrophes, natural disasters inform equally mysterious statements. The artist addresses the socio-pop sphere, which is were they function. In the TV news, every phenomenon receives its logo, graphic setting, jingle and schematic representation, e.g. Flood or Catastrophe. These „icons” are to assist in perception of these events, explain, flatten and compress them. Rafał Dominik’s works constitute reflections of these mysterious occurrences.

The exhibition embraces objects-sculptures and video works. They are presented at Bęc Zmiana, with some objects on temporary display on in parks at the Vistula. Objects made of easily portable materials will „wander” around Warsaw.

Rafał Dominik (born in 1985) – author and co-author of such interdisciplinary creative initiatives as: Mebleks, Waves of the Baltic Sea (with Ula Niemirska) and music projects Galactics (disco polo) and Donkey Donk (techno). Studied painting in Leon Tarasewicz workshop at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Lives in Warsaw. www.mebleks.blogspot.com

WEIRD
Rafała Dominik’s wandering objects
start: 08.07, Thursday, 19.00
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw
and parks at the Vistula in Warsaw

<< Rafał Dominik, Weird, 2010

On the occasion of Warsaw Fest / wrszw.pl we kindly invite you to the premiere of a new series of t-shirts AS and LUNCHEON MEAT by a typograhic duo Fontarte, combined with a presentation of a standard designed by Jakub Stępień!

Magdalena Frankowska (1972) and Artur Frankowski (1965) have worked together as a design studio since 2004. Authors of a book on Henryk Berlewi, forerunner of contemporary functional typography and advertising graphics. www.fontarte.com

Jakub Stępień aka Hakobo (1976) – graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, one of the most outstanding Polish designer of the young generation. Cooperates with major art institutions in Poland, designing posters and exhibition catalogues and collaborating on display set design. www.hakobo.pl

*WRSZW.pl is a currently developed non-commercial portal-platform, which is to serve as a daily guide to Warsaw socio-cultural activities, a shortcut that leads straight through the information jungle to community events. Along with other Warsaw initiators of cultural activity, we formed a group. Cause in a group it goes briskly. We are developing a portal to build a milieu. We are building a milieu to create modern city. We begin with a presentation of July’s ordinary/special programme of activities. It is ordinary as it has not been planned for ages. That’s how we work on a daily basis, often 365 days a year. It’s special as, in such a mass, it brings joy.

Fontarte: Luncheon Meat+AS | Jakub Stępień: Standard
t-shirts and work leaders’ standard
time: 05.07, Monday, 19.00
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

<< Fontarte, Wawa, 2010

Finissage of the consciousness-expanding exhibition 10 Hz is combined with the premiere of publication entitled Inside Itself. The abundantly illustrated Polish-English album, accompanying Ania Witkowska’s and Adam Witkowski’s exhibition Sleepwalk in Gdańsk, transmogrified into a nearly retrospective coverage of the artists’ oeuvre! Iwona Bigos, Daniel Muzyczuk, Agata Rogoś, Stach Ruksza, Marcin Dymiter, Bogna Świątkowska, Dominik Kuryłka, Monika Weychert-Waluszko and Sebastian Cichocki were invited to contribute with their texts. Graphic design and editing by Ania Witkowska. Published by the Gdańsk City Gallery 1.

Ania Witkowska, Adam Witkowski: Into the self
time: 07.07, Wednesday, 19.00
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

The exhibition 10 Hz is organised within the framework of the Synchronicity_3 project realised with financial support of the Warsaw City Hall.


<< Ania Witkowska, Adam Witkowski: Inside Itself, Gdańsk 2010

When we talk about future form of community, design social utopias we are seduced by the vision of the social as perfect whole. Inability to bring the whole into being the way it has been planned undermines our belief in the ideals that were behind it. The presumption that "Ideal were good but the practice didn't meet them" which is often an argument against communist social.

During the seminar we would like to take this statement as descriptive not normative one and reflect on the society as an ongoing process of constant transformation in which nothing is definitively decided. I would like to discuss the society as assemblage of part that for a whole that it not logically necessary but contingently obligatory. And to look on the moments that we regard as failures as the potentially (and there interesting moments) that necessary points of passage into the better reordering of elements.

READINGS
1. Manuel DeLanda: A New Philosophy of Society. Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity
2. Oskar Hansen: Ku Formie Otwartej

In 2010 the underlying theme of the cycle of interdisciplinary events Synchronicity are micro-spaces and methods applied by inhabitants of large cities to synchronise their needs with real (im)possibilities. The small space rented by Bęc Zmiana in the centre of Warsaw is an inspiration and a challenge for architects, artists and designers invited to cooperate.

We begin with an insight into internal spaces: Ania Witkowska and Adam Witkowski, two artists whose works often address the world of pop culture, carried out a replica of the renowned Dream Machine. The appliance, built in the 1960s by beatniks Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs and mathematician Ian Sommerville, produced alpha waves (8-12 Hz) in the brain, which normally occur in the state of deep relaxation, meditation and falling asleep. Deeming the outer world invalid, it makes us focus on internal, infinite spaces. The exhibition also features video works.

I began with the assumption that if I really observe myself asleep, I will also notice if I am wearing the same clothes as when I was going to sleep; I decided to change them every four days. I was convinced that recalling what clothes I was wearing when falling asleep would not present any problem whatever while dreaming. Discipline I acquired during my dreaming exercises gave me a reason to think that I was able to store such details in memory, and recall them afterwards while dreaming. I tried as hard as I could to follow my criterion, but the results were not as I expected...
Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming, 1993

Adam Witkowski – (born in 1978) deals with visual arts (painting, graphics, installation, video), sound and music (radio projects, theatre and film music, field recordings). As of 2007, lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, Workshop of Multimedia Graphics. www.adamwitkowski.com

Ania Witkowska – (born in 1978) deals with visual arts (installation, video) and graphic design. Often addresses pop culture and consumer world, infecting it with the virus of art, frolicks with the world of advertising and marketing strategies. www.aniawitkowska.com

Ania Witkowska, Adam Witkowski
10 Hz (dream machine, video)
time: 15.06-07.07
venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

Project realised with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall
  

ArtBazaar Records is a record label releasing music by plastic artists.
The initiative bears a reference to students’ label Alma Art operating in the 1980s, which released vinyl records with music by artists related to Warsaw’s RR Gallery. The music accompanied projects and exhibitions of the artists during opening nights and concerts at the gallery. Nine albums released by Alma Art include music by, among others, Andrzej Bieżan, Andrzej Mitan, Krzysztof Knittel, Helmut Nadolski Jubilee Orchestra or Jarosław Kozłowski. Album covers played an equally important role as the music in the entire enterprise – designed by artists such as Edward Krasiński, Andrzej Szewczyk, Ryszard Winiarski, Tadeusz Rolke or Włodzimierz Borowski.

Alike Alma Art, ArtBazaar Records presents music by the youngest generation of artists. Records are released in the number of 250 copies, 66 of which with hand-made covers by artists. Records available for sale!

ABR 001 – Mariusz Tarkawian: Ameboid
The album Ameboid comprises electronic music merging synthesiser harmonies with surprising sounds of the external world – human voices, folk tunes, civilisation noise. 66 album covers were hand-made by Mariusz Tarkawian. Every single one is different!

ABR 002 – Wojtek Bąkowski: Chute
Chute could be a soundtrack to a non-existent Spoken Movie 0. The album, comprising a radio play in three parts, tackles objects and issues that are normally overlooked on a daily basis – whirring refrigerators, breaths, neighbours’ talking, mysterious hamsters living in the walls of our apartments. The B-side of the album contains only one piece – the magnum opus, black suite Death.

Time: 10.06 (Thu), 19.00
Venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

<< Mariusz Tarkawian: Ameboid, Artbazaar Records, 2010

One year after the funeral ceremony of Witryna* (Shop Window), Julia Staniszewska and Agnieszka Sural – curators of the original Witryna in Konstytucji Sq. in Warsaw – make use of the shop window at Bęc Zmiana to present the monitoring of Oskar Dawicki’s work Ten Thousand. With this work, the artist revealed a hypothetical budget of an exhibition by displaying it in Witryna in the form of a wad of banknotes. Additionally, two CCTV cameras were installed for security monitoring of the money. They were supposed to catch potential robbers of Ten Thousand on tape. Yet the registered situations, both inside and in front of Witryna, became a source of information about the audience and accidental viewers of the exhibition. The monitoring tape acquired the character of a panoptical study, allowing to observe the viewers, who often didn’t know or forgot that they were being watched.

* A year has just passed since the activity of the Witryna Gallery, operating from September 2007 to June 2009, was suspended. Witryna exhibited works beyond the traditional museum or gallery context, occupying the border zone between institutions and public space. Closure of Witryna came as a result of the curators’ objection to a project takeover attempt by the management of InfoQultura. The gallery was to resume its activity on the basis of an agreement with the new administration. However, the promise of appointing a new host of InfoQultura by means of a competiton, made by the director of the Office for Culture, remained unfulfilled.

Time: 2-14.06, opening: 2.06 (Wednesday), 19.00
Venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw
curators: Julia Staniszewska, Agnieszka Sural
monitoring service: Bartek Kraciuk
www.dobrawitryna.com

<< Oskar Dawicki: Ten thousand, monitoring still, 2008

The MURRR GALLERY is a 24-metre long street gallery in Warsaw’s Praga. The first feature this year is Playing Tag, mural by Iwona Zając.

Iwona Zając frequently tackles social issues. Since 2000 she has been dealing with wall painting and presented her murals both in Poland and abroad. One of her most renowned works is Shipyard – series of stencil graffiti on the outer walls of Gdańsk Shipyard, featuring stories of shipyard workers about their life and work. For the last several years her murals have thematically revolved mainly around the family: Mama, She-Foreigner, He taught me that. It is also the case with Playing Tag, the work that Iwona Zając carried out upon invitation of the Murrr Gallery.

- In my murals I tell my private stories, play with form, colour, share what irritates, fascinates and moves me with the audience. The murals are my personal painted diary, record of my life – the artist states.

Iwona Zając (born in 1971). Lives in Gdańsk and London. Painter. Since 2002 resident of the Colony of Artists (currently The Young City) on the premises of the Gdańsk Shipyard. iwona-zajac.com

ABOUT THE MURRR GALLERY
The Murrr Gallery was established in 2009 for artists to present works tailor-made for the venue upon invitation, embracing the specific character of the place, but also the atmosphere of the neighbourhood. At the Murrr Gallery, artists’ works harmonise, intermingle and enter into a dialogue. Previously featured artists are Dominik Cymer, Truth and Jan Kallwejt.

Venue: Lay's Wall, 24/26 Zamoyskiego St., Warsaw
Time: from 25.05.2010
Start: 25.05 [Tuesday, 12.00]
www.galeriamur.pl

OWING TO SUPPORT OF LEY'S

Album and exhibition 1994 by Mikołaj Długosz is a reflection on the foundations of modern Polish consumer culture. It presents dreams of goods and consumption, items available at bargain prices and in bulk at chain supermarkets, coming from the era marked by turbo-capitalist acceleration of the Balcerowicz Plan. The packshot photos featured by Długosz were taken in 1994 to serve the purposes of commercial releases.

In 1994 Mikołaj Długosz merges his passions of an anthropologist of the everyday, a collector of unexciting photographs and an aesthete, sensitive to the beauty of the world. 1994 is a catalogue of items without prices, shifted beyond their commercial context, although not beyond history, as the project’s title indicates. Real goods against abstract background, that’s what stays in mind, just like memories of items and fetishes that were once pivotal in the lives of consumer masses. 1994 is neither heaven nor hell of things, it is something in-between. It is not an object of cult, rather something commonplace and trivial. It is a kind of zero level indication for photo advertisements and commercial phantasies.
Adam Mazur

Mikołaj Długosz (born in 1975). Between 1999 and 2002 studied at the National Film, Television and Theatre School in Łódź and has made a living on portraying people for illustrated magazines since 2002 (among others: “L’Uomo Vogue” and British “Tank Magazine”.) Works on display at group exhibitions in Poland and abroad. Awarded with the Chimera 2005 prize for the cover of “Magazyn Lajfstyle”. Author of the album and exhibition Such nice weather and the album Real Foto featuring a collection of photos found on the Internet.

1994, EXHIBITION
time: 17.06-17.07
venue: M2 Gallery, 6 Oleandrów St., Warsaw

The publication was released with financial support of Coca-Cola

<< Mikołaj Długosz: 1994

Premiere of the latest album by Mikołaj Długosz, entitled 1994, is the main feature of this year’s Warsaw International Book Fair!

Besides, the joint stand of Bęc Zmiana Foundation and 40 000 Painters Publishing House features:
- meeting with Piotr Bazylko and Krzysztof Masiewicz, authors of 77 dzieł sztuki z historią
- books at bargain prices
- Chopin concert on a whistle!
You’re kindly invited!

264B: INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING STAND
art, design, architecture, photography
Time: 20-23.05, 10.00-18.00
Album premiere: 20.05, Thu., 18.00
Author’s meeting: 21.05, Fri., 18.00
Venue: stand 264, sector B
International Book Fair
Palace of Culture and Science, 1 Parade Sq. (Plac Defilad), Warsaw

<< Mikołaj Długosz: 1994, Bęc Zmiana Foundation, Warsaw 2010

This year’s Readings are inaugurated by a debate around the film Integral Reality with the participation of its authors – the h&h collective. The 21-minute movie combines hypnotic image with equally hypnotic, ideologically determined message conveyed in the aural layer, constituting the essence of the neoliberal myth. Additionally, possible reference points in the debate are provided by Jean Baudrillard’s writings: The Perfect Crime, 1995 and The Hyperreal (in: The Perfect Crime).

Reading #1: Integral reality
11.05., Tuesday, 18.30, admission free
Venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65/7 Mokotowska St., Warsaw
Hosted by: h&h collective (Ola Hirszfeld, Michał Herer)

* Readings for Artworkmen is a series of seminars at the Free/Slow University of Warsaw based on the principles of self-organization, parallel exchange of knowledge and intensive participation of artists, intellectuals, cultural activists and theoreticians of culture as well as members of many other disciplines.
The Free University of Warsaw – nomadic and networking educational institution established in 2009. The FUW was founded with the aim of expanding competence of the cultural milieu and is open for participants from the entire country. Our activity evokes the tradition of open universities, artistic self-education groups and free education.  www.wuw2010.pl

FUW Curator: Kuba Szreder
FUW Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation,

FUW 2010 operates with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall


<< Integral Reality, movie still, h&h, 2009

At Bęc Zmiana, as of Tuesday you can see spin-offs from the exhibition No sleep! simultaneously on display in Zielona Góra and from the artistic outing Good and Risky Party. In our micro-venue in 65 Mokotowska St. we present photographic documentation of the symposium and a selection of works from the Zielona Góra BWA gallery.

This latest show comes as the second part of the exhibition-informative cycle developed by Bęc Zmiana. This year in Mokotowska St., we present the most interesting highlights of current Polish art. Works of artists whose exhibitions take place at the same time outside the capital are brought closer to Warsaw audience at Bęc.

Stay Awake! as well as the outing and symposium Good and risky party are a continuation of the project Ain’t No Sorry, which was held in autumn 2008 at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Stay Awake! features works of graduates of Polish Academies of Art and the young generation of artists, both those who participated in Ain’t No Sorry and those invited specifically for the present exhibition. Stay Awake! was inspired by Zielona Góra’s space and artistic past. Organisers of the exhibition encourage a return to the idea of artistic outings, understood as an occasion for communication, exchange as well as meeting and getting aqcuainted with artists, musicians, theorists and viewers.

Time: 4-23.05
Venue: Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

HGW: Hakobo Graphic World is a monograpic exhibition of works of Jakub Hakobo Stępień, graphic artist and designer, which is on a simultaneous display in Wrocław and Warsaw. The exhibition inaugurates this year’s edition of the international festival OUT of STH in Wrocław as well as a series of shows scheduled for this year by Bęc Zmiana, enabling Warsaw audience to see spin-offs from exhibitions in other Polish cities.

The exhibition HGW: Hakobo Graphic World features minimalist, monochromatic, powerful graphic signs, but also wonderfully vibrant posters by Hakobo, whose artistic oeuvre is more appreciated abroad than in Poland. Jakub Stępień established his characteristic and easily discernible style of posters, elaborate visual identification systems, but also fashion design. Graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, for 10 years he has been exploring themes informed by the aesthetics of stencil graffiti and skate street culture, experimenting with fonts, legibility and undermining widespread graphic design gimmicks. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication devoted to Jakub Stępień’s projects – the album HGW: Hakobo Graphic World released in limited series.

Jakub Stępień aka Hakobo (1976) – graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, one of the most outstanding Polish designers of the young generation. John Foster, author of the album New Masters of Poster Design – Poster Design for the Next Century included him in the group of 50 best poster artists of the world. His works were published by the Dutch magazine Items and French Etapes, specialising in publications devoted to graphic design. Hakobo cooperates with major art institutions in Poland, designing posters and exhibition catalogues and collaborating on display set design. Author of visual identification of, among others, Museum of Art in Łódź, Dialogue of Four Cultures Festival and the first design festival in Poland – Łódź Design 2007. www.hakobo.pl

Time: 09.04-22.05
Openings: 09.04, Friday, 19.00,
BWA Design, 2-4 Świdnicka St., Wrocław

Bęc Zmiana, 65 Mokotowska St., Warsaw

<< Jakub Hakobo Stępień, HGW, 2010

The latest book by Piotr Bazylko and Krzysztof Masiewicz 77 dzieł sztuki z historią. Opowiadanie zebrane  [77 Works of Art with a history. Collected tales] comes as a result of collecting stories, not objects of art. 77 dzieł sztuki z historią is a book for both those who are just embarking on their adventure with contemporary art, and those who fancy unique stories from behind the scenes of the art world.

Where and when did artistic impotence seize Wilhelm Sasnal? How and why was Zuzanna Janin preparing for a fight with Przemysław Saleta? How did Wojciech Fangor earn his first flat? Which classic Polish painter entitled his work Shit honking on a bend? On the occasion of what auction did Piotr Bazylko and Krzysztof Masiewcz first meet?

Authors of texts and covered artists include, among others, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Paweł Althamer, Edward Dwurnik, Wojciech Fangor, Wojciech Fibak, Tadeusz Kantor, Józef Robakowski, Wilhelm Sasnal, Andrzej Starmach, Leon Tarasewicz, Andrzej Wróblewski, Jakub Julian Ziółowski.
The premiere features a debate with guests: Piotr Bazylko, Karol Radziszewski, Piotr Kosiewski.

Piotr Bazylko (1968) i Krzysztof Masiewicz (1969) – authors of artbazaar.blogspot.com, blog devoted to Polish contemporary art market and Przewodnik kolekcjonera sztuki najnowszej [Collector’s Guide to Latest Art], published in 2008 by the Bęc Zmiana Foundation and Ha!Art Corporation.

Karol Radziszewski (1980) – painter, performer, commentator. Founder, publisher and editor-in-chief of the magazine DIK Fagazine. Lives and works in Warsaw.

Piotr Kosiewski (1967) – art historian, critic. In constant cooperation with the Znak monthly and Kwartalnik Literacki. Co-editor of collective volumes, among others Historycy polscy i ukraińscy wobec problemów XX wieku [Polish and Ukrainian Historians and Problems of the 20th Century] and Wojny bałkańskie [Balkan Wars]

Time: 29.03.10, 19.00
Venue: Numery Litery Café
26 Wilcza St., Warsaw

P. Bazylko, K. Masiewicz: 77 dzieł sztuki z historią. Opowiadania zebrane
publisher: 40 000 painters, Bęc Zmiana Foundation
format: 11,7 x 16,5 cm, abundantly illustrated
price: 36 PLN

Deer-bookstand comes from the collection signed by Rafał Dominik - Mebleks. The author describes it as follows: However bad that sounds, Mebleks is a kind of project for alternative design, or not even design, but designing things that are abstract and strange, but vested with an utilitarian function. I aimed to create something like a company which would sell things that don’t exist (being sheer concepts) and attempt to deflate the conceited and stiff contemporary design. Yet, apart from that all, it also provides an opportunity to have a good laugh and surprise myself making up ever-stranger objects, names etc.

Rafał Dominik – born in 1985. Author and co-author of such creative initiatives as: Mebleks, Fale Bałtyku (with Ula Niemirska) and music projects Galaktic (disco polo) and Donkey Donk (techno). Studied painting in the workshop of Leon Tarasewicz at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Lives in Warsaw.

Deer-bookstand available on sale. Info on site (in the forest)

Bęc Zmiana, Mokotowska 65/7, Warsaw
Until 15.03, Mon-Fri, 11-19, weekends and afterhours through the shop window

<< Rafał Dominik, Deer (Mebleks), phot. R. Dominik

The Island. Synchronicity – Jakub Szczęsny’s project of a floating platform for water purification, presented by Bęc Zmiana, entered the Semi-Final of The Buckminster Fuller Challenge.

The competition is organised every year by The Buckminster Institute in New York to select and popularise projects that have the future potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.  

All semi-final projects are included into the research programme of the Institute and the winner is awarded a 100 000 $ grant to support the development and implementation of the project. Final results in May!

At the same time, preparations are carried out in Warsaw to implement the project on an experimental basis. The device purifies water only owing to the effort of the city dwellers who are willing to obtain clean water from the Vistula – it is powered by training machines installed on the platform.

*The project was carried out in 2009 as a part of the Synchronicity 2 festival, realised with financial support of the City of Warsaw. It is covered heavily in the media abroad, not only those devoted to architecture and design, but also those concerned with ecology and responsible business.


Full list of Semi-Finalists available at:
http://challenge.bfi.org/30_Semi_Finalists

 << Jakub Szczęsny, The Island. Synchronicity, 2009

About The Buckminster Fuller Challenge >

Maurycy Gomulicki, artist, graphic designer, photographer and author of artistic installations, abundant personality and pleasure connoisseur was awarded the title of the Man of the Year by readers of Gazeta Co Jest Grane.
Maurycy’s last year’s project "Światłotrysk", commonly referred to as the ”pink neon” is located in the park in Warsaw’s Kępa Potocka. It shines bright every evening owing to the support of The City of Warsaw, The District of Żoliborz and Vattenfall Polska.
We would like to thank everybody who voted for Maurycy!

More information about the competition available at >>

<<<Photo: father and son, Maurycy and Atom, [Agent Toxic]
More Maurycy’s photos available at flickr >>

A NERVOUS NAP. ON EXPANDING THE FIELD IN DESIGN
This publication is a mature statement, given the non-existent discussion about the nature of design in Poland where the dream of “catching up” and “outrunning” international design is stronger than critical thought on the multiplication of objectsproducts.
An object is useful if it can be used. Yet, at the same time it has to be emancipated, free from the restraining chains of ownership and the burden of economic value. (…)  The imagination of artists-designers is thus focused on the image of museums transformed into functional common rooms and stores with exorbitantly priced items of snobbish design changed into workshops where adults and children together test new prototypes and abolish the boundaries of labour, fun and education. Obviously, it would result in the ultimate abolishment of disciplinary restraints, in order for scientists to share their knowledge with artists and renounce their pride by appreciating the knowledge delivered by amateurs and enthusiasts. The dream of this blatant unification has not been fully explained, though. Many times did we wake up just before it came to an end, before the closing credits appeared against the background of a merry and cheering crowd of workers, artists, urbanists, children and scientists. For so long have we only had brief, nervous naps instead of getting a proper sleep?. Sebastian Cichocki (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw)

READINGS FOR ARTWORKMEN. CULTURE, NOT PROFIT
This is the first Volume of the Journal of Free / Slow University of Warsaw and a recap on first year of its activity. Internal diversity of the Volume corresponds to the mode of operation of this para-institution, which experiments with various avenues of knowledge production and exchange. The present and the first Volume is a recap on the 212 working days of the Free/Slow University of Warsaw during the first year of its activity. Internal diversity of the Volume corresponds to the mode of operation of our para-institution, which experiments with various avenues of knowledge production and exchange.
The subject of the first edition of the Free/Slow University of Warsaw was “culture not for profit.” The initiative referred to the tradition of free education, with a focus on establishing an environment that would enable critical reflection not only on culture, but also on its social, political and economic background. The participants made an attempt at a theoretical and practical research of the conditions of knowledge and culture production in the late capitalism, an analysis of the life conditions of activists, artists and cultural operators as well as at exerting an impact on the cultural policy and participating in debates on the current and the future shape of our societies.
Publication is available in Polish in printed form and online in English: LINK

EKSPEKTATYWA AN INTERDYCYPLINARY BOOK SERIES
As Michal Arct's 1921 dictionary states, the word "ekspektatywa" means to wait, to expect, to pursue, to have hope. Ekspektatywa is therefore a direct image of the state of expectancy and curiosity about the possible scenarios in the developments of the future. Their success depends solely on the innovative potential of the representatives of a given society. Intentionally referring to concepts—underpinned by the trust in technology—which have not been carried out before, this project’s goal is to share experiences on scientific advancement and to start a dialogue of science with art. At least one person from the art and science worlds was invited to carry out a joint project in each one of them; those publication sums up whole project and presents different standpoints, scientific methods and creative attitudes.
Katarzyna Krakowiak, Andrzej Kłosak: Metaphones. Design for the Ear
Magdalena Starska, Dawid Wiener: Communication. Deepening the Feeling of the Space.
Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Andrzej Nowak: Warsaw as Emergent Structure: Em_Wwa 1.0
Janek Simon, Szymon Wichary: Mind's Struggle with the World. Games of Chance
Grzegorz Piątek, Jan Dziaczkowski, Marek Pieniążek: Mountains for Warsaw!
Kasia Fudakowski, David Álvarez Castillo: Defeating the Object. In the Event of Sculpture

The Publications was realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

To order Bęc Zmiana books: www.word-power.co.uk  

In the face of the increasing number of presentations of objects demonstrating the abilities of Polish and
international design Dizajn_wawa team’s offer is atempting invitation to contemplation. This publication is a mature statement, given the non-existent discussion about the nature of design in Poland where the dream of “catching up” and “outrunning” international design is stronger than critical thought on the multiplication of objectsproducts.

"An object is useful if it can be used. Yet, at the same time it has to be emancipated, free from the restraining chains of ownership and the burden of economic value. (…)  The imagination of artists-designers is thus focused on the image of museums transformed into functional common rooms and stores with exorbitantly priced items of snobbish design changed into workshops where adults and children together test new prototypes and abolish the boundaries of labour, fun and education. Obviously, it would result in the ultimate abolishment of disciplinary restraints, in order for scientists to share their knowledge with artists and renounce their pride by appreciating the knowledge delivered by amateurs and enthusiasts. The dream of this blatant unification has not been fully explained, though. Many times did we wake up just before it came to an end, before the closing credits appeared against the background of a merry and cheering crowd of workers, artists, urbanists, children and scientists. For so long have we only had brief, nervous naps instead of getting a proper sleep?".
Sebastian Cichocki (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw)

A Nervous Nap. On Expanding the Field in Design
Editors: Sebastian Cichocki, Bogna Świątkowska
Texts by: Charles Eames, Tom Holert, Mark Wigley, Francisco Laranjo, Marek Krajewski, Tomek Bierkowski, Agnieszka Taborska

The Publication was realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

To order Bęc Zmiana books:  www.word-power.co.uk  

This is the first Volume of the Journal of Free / Slow University of Warsaw and a recap on first year of its activity. Internal diversity of the Volume corresponds to the mode of operation of this para-institution, which experiments with various avenues of knowledge production and exchange. The present and the first Volume is a recap on the 212 working days of the Free/Slow University of Warsaw during the first year of its activity. Internal diversity of the Volume corresponds to the mode of operation of our para-institution, which experiments with various avenues of knowledge production and exchange.

The subject of the first edition of the Free/Slow University of Warsaw was “culture not for profit.” The initiative referred to the tradition of free education, with a focus on establishing an environment that would enable critical reflection not only on culture, but also on its social, political and economic background. The participants made an attempt at a theoretical and practical research of the conditions of knowledge and culture production in the late capitalism, an analysis of the life conditions of activists, artists and cultural operators as well as at exerting an impact on the cultural policy and participating in debates on the current and the future shape of our societies.

Publication is available in Polish in printed form and online in English: LINK

Readings For Art Workmen. Journal 1: Culture, not profit.
edited by: Katarzyna Chmielewska, Kuba Szreder, Tomasz Żukowski
authors: Jakob Jakobsen, Gerald Raunig, Marion von Osten, Peter Spillmann, Teresa Święćkowska, Martin Kaltwasser, Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt, Ewa Majewska, NetzNetz, Adrienne Goehler, Katarzyna Chmielewska, Michał Kozłowski, Tomasz Żukowski, Michał Herer
format: 15x22 cm

The Publication was realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

The important role that sound and cultural conditions of listening play in the work of Katarzyna Krakowiak becomes a departure point for an examination of the areas where science and art converge. In her earlier  projects, which revolved around shaping public spaces by sound and countercultural distribution of information, the artist collaborated with the architect and acoustician Andrzej Kłosak. As is suggested by its title, the project Słuchawy [Giant earphones] focuses on the perception of the phonosphere which is simultaneously received, perceived, understood (interpreted in one way or another) and, above all, shaped and in which the listener (or hearer) becomes simultaneously the creator and perceiver of the space he or she occupies.

Katarzyna Krakowiak, Andrzej Kłosak: Metaphones. Design for the Ear
curator: Krzysztof Gutfrański
edited by: Krzysztof Gutfrański, Elżbieta Petruk, Paulina Sieniuć, Bogna Świątkowska
graphic design:  Tomasz Bersz, Marian Misiak / berszmisiak.com
format: 15x22 cm

The Publication was realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

Publication is the effect of the meeting of drawer and performer Magdalena Strarska with neurocognotivist Dawid Weiner. During a few months of their collaboration, hours of meetings and talks a common ground of their interest established connected with emotions and their expression, especially empathy, its meaning for social life. Human plunging into the world, direct sensual experiencing, the matter of human intercourse these are the issues around which their reflection revolved , deepened with the excerpts of the neurocognitivist research.

Magdalena Starska, Dawid Wiener: Communication. Deepening the Feeling of the Space.
curator: Zuzanna Hadryś, Michał Lasota
editorial team: Anna Hegman, Krzysztof Gutfrański, Elżbieta Petruk, Paulina Sieniuć, Bogna Świątkowska
graphic design:  Tomasz Bersz, Marian Misiak / berszmisiak.com
format: 15x22 cm

The Publication was realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

This publication is an attempt to introduce new terms and horizons of thinking about the city in context of complex systems.

The dysfunctionality of the Warsaw's highest building - Palace of Culture and Science’s surroundings and the crisis of the urban planning is derived from the lack of the relation between various actors of the urban processes. It is out of what the need of the formulating new form of the city development is derived – antagonistic model enabling to solutions and incorporating non-human actors of the city transformations. The consequence of this statment was creating a prototype of the integrated tool to build ‘an ideal communicational situation’ dynamically joining the top-down and bottom-up. The platform Em_Wwa 1.0 enables not hierarchical communication in which the participation takes place at all levels of the urbanisation process, at the primary level of defining the problem, setting the goals as well as at the level of evaluation and choice of the plan.

Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Andrzej Nowak: Warsaw as Emergent Structure: Em_Wwa 1.0
curator: Krzysztof Gutfrański
editorial team: Anna Hegman, Krzysztof Gutfrański, Elżbieta Petruk, Paulina Sieniuć, Bogna Świątkowska
graphic design:  Tomasz Bersz, Marian Misiak / berszmisiak.com
format: 15x22

The Publication was realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

In 1992, Stefan Klincewicz, Polish businessman in Ireland, decided to outsmart the Irish Lotto system. He returned to the issue of probability, formulated for the first time by gamblers, in order to prove the finite character of that particular version of the system and get rich at the same time.

The same steps are followed by Janek Simon and Szymon Wichary – artist and psychologist, who explain the complexity of human mentality that vests faith in countless methods allowing to succeed in lotteries. People have always attempted to outsmart various lotteries by different approaches – from pseudoscientific theories of numbers, through esoterism, dusted off magic, techniques of predicting numbers on the basis of dreams, Jupiter squares etc. Persistence and passion that accompany the game reach their peak with systems that are to guarantee winning through the discovery of the lottery machines secrets. The searching for sense in the senseless, the quest for faith and hope is here equally like a beacon in the darkness, a unique chance for people with no other possibility of enhancing their status, and like an attempt to find a shortcut, enabling to outdo others on an infinite scale.

Janek Simon, Szymon Wichary: Mind's Struggle with the World. Games of Chance
curator: Krzysztof Gutfrański
editorial team: Anna Hegman, Krzysztof Gutfrański, Elżbieta Petruk, Paulina Sieniuć, Bogna Świątkowska
graphic design:  Tomasz Bersz, Marian Misiak / berszmisiak.com
format: 15x22

The Publication was realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

Let’s enhance nature – let’s check whether the flat, Masovian landscape can be elevated. It’s not only about aesthetic impressions and rendering the mundane landscape more romantic. Warsaw Mountains were conceived as a public grand projet – sublime and beautiful like the Pyramids, yet practical like highways and dams. Indeed, they will constitute a barrier that is to restrain the urban sprawl and oblige the city to concentrate within
its current borders. Today, only the ever-escaping horizon is the limit. There are no natural or legal borders. We may be quicker at improving the nature than amending the law. Mountains raised from rubbish, rubble and soil from construction works would grow gradually, in the course of years, in indicated locations. Although their creation will result in depleting investment areas, developers will also benefit. How much value would be added
to peripheral lots in Białołęka or Kawęczyn? How exorbitant a price could you demand for an apartment with a view of the mountains or a house on the slope with a panoramic view of the entire city. What about tourism? Strolls, climbing, skiing, cycling,  panoramic hotels and restaurants. The people of Warsaw could finally leave the Tatra Mountains alone.

So sursum suburbia! Let the mountains grow!

Jan Dziaczkowski, Grzegorz Piątek, Marek Pieniążek: Mountains for Warsaw!
curator: Grzegorz Piątek
editorial team: Anna Hegman, Krzysztof Gutfrański, Elżbieta Petruk, Paulina Sieniuć, Bogna Świątkowska
graphic design:  Tomasz Bersz, Marian Misiak / berszmisiak.com
format: 15x22

The Publication was realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

Quantum mechanics remains one of the least examined, key theories of the 20th century science. Most physicists apply it on a daily basis without bothering about the interpretation difficulties, let alone the people who only encountered it briefly at school.

Research on the quantum theory requires large amounts of energy, which became one of the main reasons for building accelerators of elementary particles situated strategically in various regions of the world. These large and clumsy machines are supposed to represent the current state of research on the quantum theory, reflecting at the same time the purely aesthetic claim by Niels Bohr – ‘who is not shocked by the quantum theory, does not understand it’. What is there in the quantum theory that despite major difficulties, new attempts are still made at understand understanding its complexity?

These doubts are tackled by the collaborative project of Kasia Fudakowski and astrophysicist David Alvarez Castillo. Parallels of semantic research and quantum theory allow to enter a paradoxical domain, hidden behind the rigid frames of our mental systems.

Kasia Fudakowski, David Álvarez Castillo: Defeating the Object. In the Event of Sculpture
curator: Krzysztof Gutfrański
editorial team: Anna Hegman, Krzysztof Gutfrański, Elżbieta Petruk, Paulina Sieniuć, Bogna Świątkowska
graphic design:  Tomasz Bersz, Marian Misiak / berszmisiak.com
format: 15x22

The Publication was realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

The neon sign, in the shape of a huge glass with pink soda bubbles flying into the air, is 17 metres high and was designed by Maurycy Gomulicki. The work on the neon sign took almost two years. It is placed in the open urban space of Kępa Potocka Park.
The aim of the project was not only to show Gomulicki’s work in open urban space which he favours, but also to place it in the Żoliborz district, with which his family has been connected for generations.
Maurycy Gomulicki about the project: “(…) We are a serious and hard-hit nation, we know how to think, analyse, but how do we actually handle such a subject like the beauty of life – how much space is given to it in our art and culture? There are times when you might think that Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo never existed here; that only the January Uprising and Treblinka serve as important counterpoints in our history. When we stroll around Warsaw we find monuments to glory, martyrdom and heroism every couple of minutes. But I, like it or not, aware of the blood shed still smile at the satyrs and nymphs in Łazienki Park or in the Saxon Garden; the treble clef at the back of the Music Academy building pleases me; I wait expectantly for the next Rose Exhibition. Hence the idea for a contemporary monument to lightness, joy, to beauty of the moment and its transience: you can and should enjoy life, it is worth reminding, focusing attention on it, and provoking this type of experience (…).”

Maurycy Gomulicki, b. 1969 in Warsaw. Polish graphic artist, photographer, author of art installations and short films. Studied at the Graphic Design Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1987-1992). He also studied at the Facultat de Belles Arts at the University in Barcelona 1992-1993; at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan, 1994; and at Centro Multimedia del Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico [w pol. wersji nie ma, że to Meksyk!] 1997-1998. He has presented his works – computer graphics, drawings, installations, and photographs – at numerous exhibitions in Poland and abroad. A consultant and co-author of photographs in the ABCDF project: Mexico City visual dictionary (2000-2002). His project Air Bridge was carried out in 2003-2005 as part of InSite – Art Practices in the Public Domain in San Diego, US and in Tijuana, Mexico. His photo album W-WA with pictures of Warsaw was published by the Bęc Zmiana Foundation in 2007. He lives in Warsaw and Mexico.

The project has been carried out by Bęc Zmiana Foundation as part of the Transformations Art Festival by the Vistula, thanks to the Capital City of Warsaw grant.
www.warszawa2016
Partner: Żoliborz District Government

Sponsor of neon sign:

<<<Photo by Mirella von Chrupek

Chto delat/What is to be done? was founded in early 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod (see full list of participants on the web site) with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism.
Since then, Chto delat has been publishing an English-Russian newspaper on issues central to engaged culture, with a special focus on the relationship between a repoliticization of Russian intellectual culture and its broader international context. These newspapers are usually produced in the context of collective initiatives such as art projects or conferences.

In his talk, Chto delat co-editor David Riff will talk about the potentialities and pitfalls of artistic, intellectual, and poltical self-organization under hostile contexts such as the one in Russia, and how projects like Chto delat can spark developments beyond their narrow, sectarian scope.

David Riff studied cultural anthropology at SUNY New Paltz (US) and slavonic studies and art history at the Ruhr University Bochum (Germany). In the early 2000s, he wrote two monographs on the non-conformist Soviet artists of the Sixties, Vadim Sidur and Vladimir Yankilevsky. He has been living in Moscow since 2002, where he has been translating and writing art criticism and theory, contributing to Flash Art, springerin, Moscow Art Magazine, documenta 12 magazine (issues 2 and 3), as well as Rethinking Marxism. A member of the workgroup Chto delat and co-editor of its newspaper since 2003, Riff also participated in the 52nd Venice Biennale in collaboration with Dmitry Gutov on a project called the Karl Marx School of the English Language. He is currently contributing editor of the Russian internet culture portal openspace.ru

Wednesday, 28.10, at 18.00
DELIKATESY.TR, ul. Marszałkowska 8, Warszawa

The meeting will be carried out in english

Co-operation:

WUW curator: Kuba Szreder
WUW organiser: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana
WUW partners: Fundacja Res Publica, Fundacja InSitu, Stowarzyszenie Komuna Otwock, Stowarzyszenie Artanimacje, Stowarzyszenie Duopolis

The WUW project is financed from the dotations of the capital city of Warsaw

<<< Negation of negation at show "October. Exit. Memory. Desire", ARTRA Galery, Milano 2007

THE ISLAND. SYNCHRONICITY is a floating platform, which holds nine pieces of training equipment placed around a small trough with purified water flowing from cisterns with filters placed above it. The water is pumped straight into the Vistula river by kinetic pumps fuelled by the muscle power of persons using the equipment.
The platform is connected with land by a wheelchair-accessible gang-plank that is closed at night. The platform is lit by LED lights, thanks to which it serves as a sign even after dark, when it is closed.

A book consisting of texts that problematize the project summarizes the work of Kuba Szczęsny and his group of co-workers invited to participate in this enterprise.
By transmitting the energy from fitness machines to a system of filters, not only does he associate physical effort with an ultimate objective, rendering it labour-like, but he also makes it possible to experience the fruits of our labour (to see, touch, sense and taste). One of the most acute consequences of labour alienation is the decrease in the sense of agency.  By enabling the experience of the direct transposition of one’s effort (and common effort) into the rectification of an ostensibly hopeless situation, Szczęsny’s ‘island’ sustains political competencies and gives us practice in thinking in utopian terms. Kuba Mikurda, Miracle on the Vistula, Island. Synchronicity, Foundation Bęc Zmiana 2009

www.synchronicity.pl

Time: 13-26.10.2009
Opening: 13.10 (Tuesday), 8.00 pm
Discussion/Book Launch Party: 20.10, Delikatesy.TR, Marszałkowska 8, Warsaw
Place: Bęc Zmiana Foundation, Mokotowska 65,  Warsaw

Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation
The Project is realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

Synchronicity_Warsaw is a project where voice is given to architects who search for solutions to contemporary social, political, economic, aesthetic and emotional issues visible in urban spaces.
The first part of the project was a book from the three-volume publication W [Is for Warsaw] published in 2007. Entitled No Hear, No See it was prepared by architect Jakub Szczęsny, who invited several designers from around the world to take part in the project.
In 2008 Synchronicity_Warsaw took the shape of an exhibition showing projects of possible scenarios of Warsaw city’s development. Jakub Szczęsny’s Synchronisation light installation was also completed as part of the project.
A number of projects have been carried out as part of Synchronicity_Warsaw in 2009. Magda Czapiewska’s and Karol Murlak’s Światłosłowa [Lightwords] were about inscribing a quote from Andrzej Sosnowski’s poem on the Vistula boulevard; the inscription was made in graduated letters visible only after dusk. Maurycy Gomulicki’s Światłotrysk [Lightspurt] neon was made as a monument to bliss, the beauty of the moment, and to life’s pleasures in the Kępa Potocka park. And there was The Island. Synchronisation, Jakub Szczęsny’s research project. As a result, and thanks to the voluntary commitment of Warsaw’s residents, the Vistula water purifying system was worked out.

<<< Jakub Szczęsny: The Island. Synchronicity, Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, Warsaw 2009. Graphic design: Tomek Bersz / Marian Misiak

Together with a group of theorists, researchers and artists from London we will examine the human-physical dimensions of public space. The meeting was initiated by members of Critical Practice (Marscha Bradfield, Neil Cummings, Michaela Ross, Cinizia Cremona).
 
What happens with our bodies when we are in public view or speaking publicly? For what types of bodies is our public space constructed? What type of physical attributes are excluded from the public sphere, and which types are featured on posters and advertisements?
 
The meeting will be conducted under open space conference principles according to which the agenda is generated by participants. Everyone in attendance is highly encouraged to speak up during the discussions.

PUBLIC BODY, barcamp
Time: 17.10, saturday, 14.00-21.00
Place: "Nowy Wspanialy Świat" (old cafe "Nowy Świat"), Nowy Świat St. 63
Registration: aga@funbec.eu

The WUW project is financed from the dotations of the capital city of Warsaw

<<< source: http://criticalpracticechelsea.org

This time the Free University (WUW) is going on a field trip. The upcoming weekend session of WUW will focus on urban and suburban survival techniques in the times of late capitalism. We will spend two days learning and trying out practical, low-cost ways of making our day-to-day life more pleasant.
 
On Saturday we will head to the Kampinos Nature Reserve where we will swing on ropes, climb trees, gather mushrooms, ford rivers, and go moose watching. Dress appropriate for this time of year, and bring provisions and a thermos full of your beverage of choice.
 
On Sunday, Tomek Saciłowski will take us to hang out with some hip gardeners. Activities will include conserving fruit (lots of apples and nuts this year), ceramics, basket weaving and we will have a bonfire. All this in accordance with the principle: The less you pay, the less you work.  Now that’s what we call freedom in the air!
 
Vahida Ramujkic – is currently researching social and environmental transformations through the application of physical and mental recycling. Using her intuition and experience, she tries to create situations in which good things can happen spontaneously. Read more at http://irational.org/vahida/
 
Tomek Saciłowski – gardener, allotment-holder, author, artist, and founder of the pioneering initiative „Allotment, Work, Education."

Time: 10-11.10.2009, saturday and sunday
Place: 10.10 (saturday), 11.00am meeting at Bęc Zmianą, Mokotowska St. 65  11.10 (sunday), 12.00am, "Rodzinne Ogródki Działkowe Siekierki", Nadrzeczna St. 6a, allotment  #76

The Project is realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

<<< Heath Bunting, International Tree Climbing Day

The project Disappear by the Vistula is a serie of art-ecology-existential experiments carried out on the banks of the Vistula River.

Our starting point is a simple observation: more civilisation means less nature. If we promote a wild river it ceases to be wild. Maintaining a fine balance between culture and nature, art and environment, artists and society is possible only if we break off with artistic public-relations clichés in public space. This is why we challenge the logic behind spectacular urban-space production strategies. Instead of dazzling the public with art, we walk on the borders of visibility, travelling across the ambiguous margins of vision. We focus on the subtle play between the artist and the space in which he works.

Together with a group of artists we offer a series of experiments on the process of disappearing, camouflage, invisibility. Slight river bank manipulations, pirate cruises, iriy visits, arranging disturbing film sets, hiding in the wild. We attempt to become part in the nature or civilisation context in order to make the difference between the individual being and his/her social or ecological surroundings unobvious. As the Dutch and Italian painters centuries ago, we too are fascinated by the issues of mimesis, that is of the representation and mirroring of nature by culture. The assimilation of the picture to what it is supposed to depict. Yet in our case this eternal problem is filtered through flirtations with the achievements of public and land art. Thus, instead of having issues with links between depicting and that what is depicted, we work on the dynamic beam of relations linking the artist with his environment. Their inner dynamics push us beyond what is easily noticed, easily classified or judged. Together with the Vistula’s stream we sail out to the fog-enveloped unobvious.



The actions summation will be a publication about man-civilisation relation, disappearing, camuflage and spreading out from different perspectives.

Remarkable artists who move round the paradoxical axis of visibility have been invited to take part in the undertaking: Paweł Althamer, Kurant, Hubert Czerepok, Konrad Pustoła, Honza Zamojski, Joanna Rajkowska, Kasia Krakowiak, Roman Dziadkiewicz, Maciej Kurak, Robert Rumas, Łukasz Jasturbczak, Natalia Romik.

Curator: Kuba Szreder
Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

Runs: august-october 2009   Place: Warsaw, banks of Vistula River
The project is a part of Transformations Art Festival by the Vistula, accomplished thanks to the grants of the city of Warsaw.

www.znikanie.pl

The  project is financed from the dotations of the capital city of Warsaw

DIZAJNWAWA_3/ GOGO (Maria Makowska, Piotr Stolarski)

In the face of the increasing number of presentations of objects demonstrating the abilities of Polish and international design, GOGO team’s offer is a tempting invitation to contemplation.
Despite its modest size the exhibition is a mature statement, given the non-existent discussion about the nature of design in our country where the dream of “catching up” and “outrunning” international design is stronger than critical thought on the multiplication of objects-products.

For the Dizajnwawa exhibition series GOGO created a designer’s workshop, that is a place where the designer spends a “wolfish” amount of time. For GOGO it is neither a workshop with machines nor a park bench, but a desk with a laptop plus a source of light. The bench and the lamp, which were made especially for the exhibition, allude in their form to previous projects made by GOGO; they are also provided with comments, dominating the objects, taken from Charles Bukowski’s short poem, Art: “As the spirit wanes the form appears”.

The objects designed by GOGO are fully functional and at the same time perverse, like the Grand Piano coffee table. It should become a furniture bestseller of the 2010 Chopin Year despite being made of the cheapest material – high-polish OSB. Another important issue in GOGO’s work is unusual application and the physical tangibility of materials used to make the projects. In the case of the Re-use-it lamp they are recycled, welded plastic bags with the remainders of logos of well-known supermarket and clothing-company chains.

Time: 29.09-12.10
Place: Bęc Zmiana Foundation, Mokotowska 65, Warsaw

Organiser: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

*DIZAJNWAWA is a series of exhibitions focusing on the work of young Warsaw designers. They have been invited to participate because of their exceptionally interesting design creations, use of novel solutions, and their projects’ connection either with the public space of the city or with Warsaw as the country’s capital.

The Project is realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

<< GOGO, Grand Piano coffee table, Pawn stool, Re-Bag-It lamp, quote from Charles Bukowski’s poem Art, 1979 [“As the spirit wanes the form appears”]

Meeting with Magda Starska, draughtswoman and author of installations is an annoucement of the broader experiment which is prepared with help of neuro-cognitivist, dr Dawid Wiener. The cooperation's starting point is apprisal of contemporaneity, builded around questions like: how to assess impact on human perception which would have intercommunication freed from the limitations of time and space. Starska and Wiener describe contemporary society as "flat" and "dense", because conditions of human meeting seem suspended. Effects of this state have had vast influence over emotional and cognitive abilities. Starska's experiment supported by neuro-cognitive background will assume that "returning" of sense of space will bring back to spectators feeling of stability between this what really is and this what is only work of imagination. It could be also a kind of cut down to size - into reality of primal reactions and emotions. During meeting Magda Starska will present docuentation of her previous works, video recordings and drawings (one week exhibition).

Curator: Michał Lasota (Galeria Stereo, Poznań)
Co-op: Zuzanna Hadryś (Galeria Stereo, Poznań)

ABOUT PARTICIPANTS
Magdalena Starska - author of drawings, performance and installations. In 2005 she obtained diplomma on Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan University (professor Jaroslaw Kozlowski workroom). Member of PENERSTWO group. The base of her artistic practice is to create social situations. Her point of interest is in what way personal and common features could are valuable in a sense of social terms. She lives and works in Poznan.
Dawid Wiener - Professor at Institute of Logics and Cognitive Science of the Psychology Departament at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. Chief of Neurocognitive Lab. His research area are emotions investigations, cognitive psychopathology and impact of information technology on human behaviour. Lives and works in Poznan.
Michał Lasota - curator, co-founder of Fundacja Transmisja and Galeria Stereo in Poznan. Involved in promotion of young art, organizer of group shows ("Śniące ciała", "Brzuch", "A!", "Dobre do domu i na dwór") and individual exhibitions (for example: Radek Szlaga & Wojtek Bąkowski, Izy Tarasewicz). Lives and works in Poznan.

MORE ABOUT EKSPEKTATYWA: www.ekspektatywa.pl

Time: 31.08.2009, 7.30PM
Place: Bęc Zmiana, ul. Mokotowska 65, Warszawa

Organizer: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

The Project is realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

DIZAJNWAWA_2/ Urban Dynamo/Kompott (Maja Ganszyniec, Paweł Jasiewicz, Krystian Kowalski, Dominic Hargreaves, Harry Thaler, Valentin Vodev, Nicola Zocca)

Projects facilitating safe and spatially economical bike parkings, vehicles facilitating transport with the use of one’s own muscle power, as well as a foldable bike, comfortable enough to carry thanks to its construction and its shrinking into compact size can be found among the projects shown at the exhibition. There Nicola Zocca’s and Harry Thaler’s Compressedairbike is a work which merges comfort with environment-friendly design.

The authors of the Urban Dynamo concept, Maja Ganszyniec, Paweł Jasiewicz, Krystian Kowalski and Marcin Krygier (Kompott design team), write the following about the selection of works for the exhibition:
The city lives because we move inside it, and the way we do that creates its space. The aim of this exhibition is to present alternative means of transportation in the city, as well as possibilities of creating its image.
We have chosen projects which show how to cleverly combine the possibilities of public transport with vehicles powered with one’s own muscles. The energy accumulated in the body allows cheap, easy and environment-friendly transport around town. By presenting a couple of examples, Urban Dynamo shows how to transform urban impediments into life energy without rejecting the inventions of civilization.

Time: 13-28.08.2009
Place: Bęc Zmiana, Mokotowska 65/7, Warsaw

Organizer: Bęc Zmiana Foundation

The Project is realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall

<<< Kompott: Parkcycle
<<<Dominic Hargreaves: Transporter

First edition of interdisciplinary cycle Ekspektatywa is devoted to Guglielmo Marconi theory about possibility to hear whole sounds which diminished with use of special sensitive devices. Gdansk based artist Kasia Krakowiak with Andrzej Klosek - architect and acoustic take his goal on question of aural qualities of sound wave phenomenon and possibility of its existence against the lapse of time. What happens with sound which diminished and isn't audible any more? And in what way - if its even possible - we can hear unrecorded sounds from the past? The team inspired by the story of last song played on the sinking titanic start to create fullly analogue broadcasting-receiving-measuring fixture for investigate possibility of hearing passed sounds in the case of echo phenomenon. Working with echo in the city goes to concentrate audience with questions of "soundscape".

ABOUT ARTIST
Born in 1980. She was an assistant of professor Miroslaw Balka at Sculpture Departament of Adam Mickiewicz University Academy of Fine Arts. Since 2008 she has developed mobile radio all. FM project. Participant of many group and also individual shows. She creates interdisciplinary groups, co-operating with mobile-phones technology, shortwave transmitters users, programmers. Her project FreeRadioJaffa is sound intervention in the public space based on Mini FM technology - by aproppriating frequencies from existing stations and to broadcast her own shows on it. In Israel her shows deals with situation of Arab people eviction from Jaffa,in Wroclaw [PL] - with situation of inhabitants of after-german houses. Within the 'Ain't no sorry show' exibition at Warsaw MoMA she used potential of noise. She continues this investigation by project 'I'll take you to the Moon' at CCA in Torun (within the show 'Gone to Croatan'). Lives and works in Gdansk.

www.radiofreejaffa.com
www.20khz.hmfactory.com

ABOUT EKSPEKTATYWA
Taken from 1921. Michal Arct's dictionary word "ekspektatywa" means: to waiting for,to expect, to apply with hope". Therefore Ekspektatywa is direct reflection of expectancy state  and curiosity facing with possible scenarios of developing the future. Its well-being depends only on the innovative potential of respective subiects from society (in question). Intentionally refering to unrealized prospects and ideas based on trusting in technology development, the goal of the project was to share experiences dealing with technological development and to activate dialogue between art and science. In six editions we will present various statements, scientific methods and creative attitudes. For each project we invite no less than one person from the art and science worlds, and additionaly inside which we want to issue - beside the general presentation - special publication, summing up each edition.
www.ekspektatywa.pl

Start / Preview: 29.07 - 6.08.2009
Place: Bęc Zmiana, Mokotowska 65, Warszawa

Organizer: New Culture Foundation Bec Zmiana

The Project is realized with financial support from the Warsaw City Hall.

After last year's success a new, up-dated map of Warsaw for young travellers is being published. It presents 105 spots in the city chosen again by travellers, young inhabitants and owners of hostels in Warsaw. The second version of the map of Warsaw emphasises the ties between the city and Frédéric Chopin, celebrating the forthcoming Chopin Year.
The map is a result of cooperation among the non-profit organisation USE-IT EUROPE, which is tourist info for young people, Promotion Department of the City Hall of Warsaw and Bęc Zmiana Foundation.

The following maps and city guides have so far been made available by USE-IT Europe: Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Oslo, Malmö, Copenhagen, Ljubljana, Dresden and lately for the first time also Łódź.

USE-IT publishes maps and other informative materials, geared towards young people travelling through Europe on a tight budget. The aim of USE-IT is to create non-commercial publications with practical and possibly up-to-date content. They include information that is of a genuine use to travellers: Where to find the best parties? Which museum is really worth a visit? What are the local customs? USE-IT publications are anything but another boring tourist reader. Maps, guides and websites with the USE-IT logo are created by authors from a given city. Hence they include more than just superficial info, featuring humour, objectivity and an untypical selection of venues. For the maps are exclusively for young people, according to the rule that something for everyone is actually good for no one. / www.use-it.info

Authors: Grzegorz Piątek (text), Dominik Cymer / www.dominikcymer.pl, Rafał Szczepaniak / www.rafal-szczepaniak.com (graphic design)

The map is is free of charge and available at hostels in all major cities in Poland and in selected European cities as well as on www.use-it-warsaw.pl [download PDF A4 format].

The map of Łódź, prepared especially for ‘young travellers’ between 18 and 35 years old is now available within the European information system on cities attractive to young tourists. The map is a result of cooperation among the non-profit organisation USE-IT, Promotion, Tourism and International Cooperation Department of the City of Lódź Municipal Office and Bęc Zmiana Foundation. It is in English and features several dozens of venues, selected in the course of work by authors living in Łódź or very familiar with the city.

USE-IT publishes maps and other informative materials, geared towards young people travelling through Europe on a tight budget. The aim of USE-IT is to create non-commercial publications with practical and possibly up-to-date content. They include information that is of a genuine use to travellers: Where to find the best parties? Which museum is really worth a visit? What are the local customs? USE-IT publications are anything but another boring tourist reader. Maps, guides and websites with the USE-IT logo are created by authors from a given city. Hence they include more than just superficial info, featuring humour, objectivity and an untypical selection of venues. For the maps are exclusively for young people, according to the rule that something for everyone is actually good for no one. www.use-it.info

Authors: Jakub Wandachowicz (text), John Kubiniec (translation), Maja Ruszkowska- Mazerant (Purpose – enterpreneurship in culture www.purpose.com.pl, coordinator Łódź), Michał Justyna (photography). Graphic design: Jakub Stępień / www.hakobo.art.pl

The map is is free of charge and available at hostels in all major cities in Poland and in selected European cities as well as on www.use-it-lodz.pl [download PDF A4 format]. 

Young Poland is a cycle of events closing the Polish Year in Israel, which reviews the most interesting works by Polish artists of the young generation in various areas of broadly defined design: industrial design, architecture and photography.

Black and White. Young Polish design. Group exhibition. 
The exhibition is a presentation of the youngest generation of designers who use simple means for a new, fresh look at the latest trends in the world's design, often flirting with art. Polish modern design is best visible in small items, in which Polish material culture is interpreted creatively. Sometimes, it draws on folk art, sometimes on the unique aesthetics of Polish urban spaces, often appealing to the viewer's sense of humour. The simplest materials are paired up with modern ones, a graceful design of an objects often compensates for its fragility and evidently temporary character. Polish youngest design is distinctive, black-and-white: you either like or hate it. Therefore the exhibition will feature designs that are either black or white. The exhibition will be held in the lobby of the Maxim Hotel, where the majority of Polish artists, curators and journalists involved in the Polish Year in Israel event will stay. 
Participating designers: 
Aleksandra Adamczyk, AZE Design, Babaakcja, Agnieszka Bar, DBWT, Maja Ganszyniec, GOGO, Paweł Jasiewicz, Kafti Design, Agnieszka Kajper, Knockoutdesign, Lapolka, Limo, Robert Majkut, MALAFOR, Karina Marusińska, Ola Mirecka, Puff Buff, Tomek Rygalik, Zuzanna Malinowska i Katarzyna Bazylczyk.

Opening: 7 June, 8 p.m, Runs: 7 – 30 June 
Venue: the Maxim Hotel, Hayarkon Str. 86, Tel Aviv

Real foto Mikołaj Długosz
Real foto is a series of photographs found on the Polish web auction service Allegro and compiled by Mikołaj Długosz, who follows the path of artists such as Martin Parr, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel. This frequently bizarre collection of photographs of objects put up for sale says more about their owners than they would like to disclose themselves. The photography critic and curator Adam Mazur wrote about Real foto: "These pictures were not intended to be beautiful but useful. Thanks to Długosz, they have become useful in more ways: they make a statement about the country's economy, culture, society and aesthetics; they make a statement about us. One might say this have always been the case with amateur photography which nobody ever treated as art. But these days so many pictures are taken that the artist's role is to order and fish out – from a chaos, from a mass of images – integral wholes that will not overwhelm but make the viewer's imagination start working in a different direction and change our way of looking at what is most fleeting. It resembles a collection of illuminations, initiations, which are like a flash but lead nowhere. These pictures are superficial and flat. This is what makes them graceful. This is an antidote to deep art photography”. 

Opening: 4 June 8 p.m. 
Runs: 4 – 9 June venue: Halalit (SpaceShip) Gallery, Hayarkon Str. 70, Tel Aviv 

Resourceful Workshops Tomek Rygalik 
Tomasz Rygalik, one of the most talented Polish designers of the young generation will hold a workshop with the local community of Jaffa and participants of the Blue Festival. Through a simple system of connectors they can build any forms they wish using OSB boards: a deck chair, a bench, a table, a kids' playing platform, a sun shade or anything their fancy dictates. The number of combinations and forms is infinite. The objects created during the workshop will be presented to a cultural centre in Jaffa. 

Dates: 18 June 
Venue: Blue Festival, Jaffa, old harbour 

Sensorama [interactive installation].  Jakub Szczęsny (Poland), Eifo Dana Group (Israel) 
Sensorama is a winter-making machine. It will land in the old harbour of Jaffa, inviting participants of the Blue Festival, tired from the June heat, to a sensory trip that will carry them away for a moment from the 2009 Israeli reality to Poland's hardest winter of the 20th century in 1979. The machine will reproduce all the sensations generated by a frosty winter such as images, temperature, smell, sound and the level of air humidity. Putting their heads inside Sensorama, three persons, complete strangers to one another, will simultaneously experience a reality totally alien to them, which cuts down to size everything that normally separates them: religion, origin or social status. 

Date: 18 June 
Venue: Blue Festival, Jaffa, old harbour

Młoda Polska. Dizajn 2009 / Young Poland. Design 2009 
3 - 30 June 2009

Organizers: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, Stowarzyszenie Artanimacje
Partners: Halalit, Maxim Hotel, Filmoteka Polska
Project co-organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polish Year in Israel 2008/2009 
Project financed from the means of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland
www.poland-israel.org

Exhibition catalouge - pdf

MURRR Gallery came to life in a busy space of the capital, daily swept by thousands of glances. Now it has become an exhibition space for modern, urban style large-format works. MURRR Gallery will reveal successive projects in a series of presentations, each of them lasting several months. The artists’ works will have the chance to harmonize, overlap and be in dialogue with each other. What’s more, they will be able to displace each other from the MURRR Gallery’s space. A simple rule, like all city rules: “It’s not your place!”

MURRR Gallery is a visible sign in the city’s space. It is 24 metres long, and it is there that the works of the outstanding young Polish artists invited will be presented. The works will be created exclusively for that space, bearing in mind its uniqueness, as well as the character of the immediate neighbourhood.
The first presentation shows the works of Dominik Cymer, an acclaimed graphic artist and designer affiliated with BędzinBeat team, author of many brilliant projects on industrial topics. Dominik Cymer creates a world of extraordinary colour intensity, full of surprising events, creatures, buildings, and constructions. His work Wydobycie koloru [Colour Output] can be understood as a search for and discovery of colour in a world often described as grey. It can also be an indication of a certain lifestyle, a way of thinking about the world in which the bright side gets the better of the dark side.
FILM: WORK / EDITING

Dominik Cymer does graphic design, illustration and interactive media. He has taken part in numerous exhibitions, among others Dizajn! Dizajn! at Bielska Gallery BWA, Bielsko-Biala; Alarm Warszawa! at InfoQultura, Warsaw; Alternatif Turistik at Kronika, Bytom. Netizens Creative Director. Winner of numerous awards, including KTR Polish Advertising Competition (2008, 2009) in Advertising Illustration and Graphic Design for Use-It map of Warsaw, published by the Capital City of Warsaw and Bęc Zmiana Foundation.

Artists invited to participate in the project: Dominik Cymer, Truth, Jan Kallwejt, m-city Co-operation: Bęc Zmiana Foundation www.galeriamur.pl

Date: starts June 1
Place: Lay's Wall, Zamoyskiego 24/26, Warsaw

Under the heading “How Much Is Enough?” a series of meetings with Daniel Hauser, member of RELAX Studios Swiss art team, make up the first part of the newly set up Warsaw’s Free University. It is a two-day film club where the topic of discussion will be the creations of both Polish and foreign movie directors while looking at the golden age of toppling capitalism.
WFU is a nomadic and network educational institution. Visits to Warsaw made by foreign artists and cultural activists are to be taken as opportunities for meetings, discussions and sharing of thought. The meetings are supposed to be somewhat spontaneous, going beyond the typical “artist meets audience” format. They will often be of a working nature, linked to the research conducted by the invited guests, as well as local projects. The aim of those meetings will be to form a joint and mutually rewarding exchange. This type of activity constitutes one of WFU’s bases for action.

In their activities RELAX Studios centre on the question of relations between artistic production and economic as well as political structures of our societies. They are known as the creators of conceptual interventions in public spaces, interfering with office buildings, corporate and institutional headquarters (including UN Headquarters in 2004). They often work with short mottos and phrases set in public spaces, the more catchy ones being “thinking alone is criminal,” or “you pay but you don’t agree with the price”. In Warsaw RELAX Studios are currently working on actions in public spaces. The results will be shown in early autumn 2009 as part of Passengers Festival, an artistic undertaking for times of crisis which has been turning the global economic system upside down. A big role is to be played by ironic references to classic cinematic pictures of money-making, in addition to hectic economic activity. RELAX Studios meetings are organised in partnership with Passengers Festival and Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council.

Date: May 28-29 (Thursday, Friday), 6 pm
Place: Nizio Gallery, Inżynierska 3, Warsaw
WFU Curator: Kuba Szreder
WFU Organizer: Bęc Zmiana Foundation
WFU Partners: Res Publica Foundation, InSitu Foundation, Komuna Otwock Association, Artanimacje Association, Duopolis Association

WFU 2009 Project is funded by the Capital City of Warsaw grant. www.wuw2009.pl

Those interested in Polish art of the 80s immediately recognise the title of Ryszard Woźniak’s, member of Gruppa art group, painting made almost 30 years ago. The title has been used by Piotr Bazylko and Krzysztof Masiewicz, authors of www.artbazaar.blogspot.com, in their newest project. Originally the painting was the artist’s reaction against the declaration of martial law. A reaction indeed traumatic and painful since the whole nation was “pushed” onto the stage against its will, as the artist once said in an interview with ArtBazaar.
How is that work interpreted by the succeeding generations? Is it one of the incidents in Poland’s newest history? Maybe it is just a piece made by an artist from legendary Gruppa, or simply a picture symbolizing the 80s in Polish art?
Bazylko and Masiewicz invited artists from the Poznan “new wave” to take part in the project. Jan Plater Zyberk from Krakow is an exception, yet he refers to the reactions to the events of 1981 most directly. In his work 10 III 1981 (the date of the new prime minister’s, Wojciech Jaruzelski’s meeting with the leader of “Solidarity”, Lech Wałęsa) he presents a record of fifteen simultaneous solitary games of chess. They are an attempt at simulating martial law – they formed the basis of the calculations on martial law’s probability of success.
Each of the artists from Poznan finds his own way of interpreting the work “New Wave is Pissing Along”. Honza Zamojski makes an envelope stamp, which is a symbol of Wu Tang Clan, the hip hop band from New York. “We’ve been surprised by Wojtek Bąkowski’s work,” Bazylko and Masiewicz confess, “because we’ve known his music interests in 80s new wave. Still, Wojtek did not allude to music interpretation but showed… a yellow man scoffing down a Bolesławiec ashtray, for those where the only ones available in the 80s, as he claimed.” The presented works can be viewed at the exhibition; you can also buy a case with the artists’ work (edition of 30 copies). In addition, a limited-edition catalogue of 100 copies has been made for the exhibition; you can also purchase Magda Starska Wiry’s book with all of the pictures made for ArtBazaar.

Time: starts May 15
Place: Bęc, Mokotowska 65, Warsaw

<<< Jakub Czyszczoń, tributetonowafala.blogspot.com

The In/Out wall unit made by Magdalena Czapiewska and Karol Murlak looks even more elegant inside Bęc Zmiana’s raw space. The minimalist simple geometric form, a combination of open recesses and closed shelves creates a space for placing books and other products of material culture.
In/Out was created during Meblościanka 2008 [Wall Unit 2008] design workshop, carried out by Vox Company and Tomek Rygalik in Poznan, May 2008. It was an international project, in which students and young designers from Polish art schools and The Royal College of Art in London took part. In/Out went into production at Vox Furniture and has been available for purchase since February 2009. Now, for the first time in Warsaw at Bęc Zmiana.
Material: laminated board (body), varnished MDF (front), colour: white. Price: 3490 PLN (we accept orders, shipping takes 3 days).

www.voxdesign.pl

After moving out from Mokotowska 65 the previous tenant left holes in the floor tiles. They were so deep they became the focus of our attention. Magda Czapiewska’s and Karol Murlak’s FLUO is a repair programme as well as a way of meeting the holes’ needs. They have been filled with material reflecting the light of ultraviolet fluorescent lamps, currently attracting even more attention. Mostly after dark.

www.designlab.com.pl

The 10th-Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw was built in 1955 from the rubble of a war-devastated capital, and was to preserve Communism’s good name for forty years. In the early 1990s it fell into ruin, being ‘revived’ by Vietnamese and Russian traders.  Since then the Stadium and the open-air market have become an  Asian town, a primeval garden, a realm of discount shopping, a  storehouse of urban legends, a piece of Land-Art, or a work camp for botanists.
The heterotopic logic of the place and its long-standing (non-)presence in the city, inspired Joanna Warsza’s curated series of live art projects The Finissage of Stadium X  and the related reader, Stadium X — A Place That Never Was. A Trip to Asia: An Acoustic Walk Around the Vietnamese Sector of
the 10th-Anniversary Stadium by Anna Gajewska, Joanna Warsza and
Ngo Van Tuong (2006); Boniek!, a one-man re-enactment of the 1982  Poland-Belgium football match by Massimo Furlan, with commentary
by Tomasz Zimoch (2007); or Radio Stadion Broadcasts by Radio
Simulator and backyardradio (2008) were subjective excursions undertaken by artists into the reality of a Stadium ‘no longer existant’. The projects, of a participative and semi-documentary nature, touched upon issues of memory, deterioration, or the problematic exoticism of the place.
The afternoon seminar at The Building and in its garden will offer a selection of short, partly performed lectures, forming a multi-faceted picture of the Stadium’s deterioration, its bizarre existence as a ‘city within a city’, and the artists’ interventions. The architectural and topographic situation of the Building in Berlin — as a detached edifice with a plot of green lawn — will play a major role in the construction of the event, which will feature a live radio broadcast by backyardradio and a garden project curated by Sebastian Cichocki.

Berlin, The Building, Platz der Vereinten Nationen 14a
Saturday April 25th., the program starts at 4 p. m.
5:00 – 5:30  Dr Stefanie Peter, anthropologist, The Stadium as Stage
5:30 – 6:00  Anda Rottenberg, curator and critic
6:00 – 6:30 Joanna Warsza, curator, Laura Palmer Foundation, Finissage of Stadium X
7:30 – 8:00 Sebastian Cichocki, curator at Warsaw MOMA, A Walk through the Ruins, or In Praise of Entropy (radio edit)
8:00 – 8:30 Warren Niesłuchowski, writer and philologist, Stadion | Spadion | Spatium: Signing-Off
8:30 – 9:00 Pit Schultz & Diana McCarty, berlin backyardradio, The Radio and The Baazar
 
Stadium X — A Place That Never Was: A Reader
Edited by Joanna Warsza. Contributing authors: Claire Bishop, Sebastian Cichocki, Benjamin Cope, Ewa Majewska, Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat, Warren Niesłuchowski, Marek Ostrowski, Grzegorz Piątek, Cezary Polak, Anda Rottenberg, Roland Schöny, Pit Schultz, Tomasz Stawiszyński, Stach Szabłowski, Ngô Van Tuong 
photos Mikołaj Długosz, Marta Pruska, Marta Orlik 
Published by Ha!art and Bęc Zmiana Foundation, Warsaw and Kraków, 2008/2009
On sale in Pro QM Berlin and at the Building
 
Organizers: The Building, Laura Palmer Foundation, Bęc Zmiana Foundation
Partners: Polish Institute Berlin, Ha!art publishing house, Pro QM Berlin, backyard radio Berlin.
This event was made possible thanks to the generous support of The German-Polish Foundation

www.stadion-x.pl

It is easier for us to say what this paper is not than to give a stiff definition of its scope. It is wiser to eliminate particular scenarios and toil in an unknown direction than stubbornly confirm the present state of affairs. An undefined tomorrow and a yesterday hard to deconstruct is more exciting than a today—predictable through and through.
The motivations behind the creation of “Format P” thus remain unclear. It is certainly not an art magazine, a literary quarterly, exhibition catalogue, nor a thematic anthology of articles (although this might be closer to the truth). We are aware of this new magazine’s moody spirit. Its content is and will remain amorphous, full of rhizomes and weeds, yet at the same time disciplined by a set of internal rules. Even the title is treated sketchily by us, for we interpret the letter P according to our current needs and whims. We roam through storehouses, get lost in big cities, we are into wandering around contemporary ruins, zoos, provincial museums, secret service archives, cemeteries. Additionally, we owe a lot to accidental reads and unplanned meetings (like the one with a certain F.R. David, who sat in the Cabinet, a club filled with smoke, in a grand M-Metropolis).

FORMAT P has a transitive character, the editorial staff co-operates with a different group of specialists on each edition, that group being entrusted with working out the concept of one edition’s substance. Each edition is bound with a strongly emphasized theme. Both individuals and groups connected with intellectual, artistic teams as well as institutions are invited to collaborate in creating the magazine. FORMAT P directs its attention to independent, peripheral centres, situated outside the mainstream; it focuses on occurrences on the “peripheries” of both art history and literature, known only to a small group of specialists. The magazine operates as a “printed lab”, in search for new, interesting correlations between different fields of culture and science.

FORMAT P#1 is focused on “The Hell of Things”. It was created in collaboration with three young curators: Dominik Kuryłek, Krzysztof Gutfrański and Ewa Opałka, as well as with the help of Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art in Bytom.

www.format-p.pl

The revealing of a micro-establishment’s potential on Mokotowska 65 in Warsaw. Biednale 2009 [Poor Biennial 2009]. Part 1: Current Topics

The work launching activities on the 15 square meters of Mokotowska 65 was created by Janusz Łukowicz, author of the Drobne Machlojki [Minor Swindles] series. About his work titled Kryzys [Crisis] Janusz wrote the following: “The crisis is already here. It might have always been here, always of some sort. If not a financial one, then some other.” We’re interested in the other!

In old-time Warsaw Mokotowska used to be the street of the affluent bourgeoisie, and it’s no different today. It’s a street of expensive restaurants, boutiques, shops with glamorous design, and spa salons. In this urban-economic space Bęc is presenting the strategy for our times. Minimum expenditure. Maximum experiment. Biednale 2009.

The experimental space of the small establishment rented by Bęc Zmiana Foundation right after a shop specializing in wooden cats moved out, will emerge as a bookshop, a place for young designers of the new generation to present their works, a Lomo-shop, a journal reading room, a cultural information spot, as well as a meeting place and space for the presentation of interdisciplinary creative work.

Transformations of the Mokotowska 65 space will be open for monitoring during their undergoing. Their frequency is yet unknown.

Date: from 5.03.2009 (Thursday), opening at 7 pm
Place: Warsaw, Mokotowska 65 (near 3 ††† Square)

<<<Janusz Łukowicz: Kryzys [Crisis], neon (Styrofoam, board, Christmas tree lights), 2008 

A mix of Socialist mausoleum, Aztec temple, and bunker system with a network of small gardens, along with a grid structure of endless market stalls – here is one of possible pictures of Socialist Realist ruin – the 10th-Anniversary Stadium and the Jarmark Europa open-air market surrounding it. After twenty years of a phantom-like existence in the middle of Warsaw, this expanse in 2008 became the construction site of a new national stadium. The book offers a selection of texts presenting a multi-faceted picture of that site’s deterioration and its bizarre existence as a ‘city within a city’. It pictures the area as a Land-Art piece and picturesque ruin, a primeval forest, a realm of precariousness and discount shopping, a work camp for archaeologists and botanists, a ‘Vietnamtown,’ a sonic phenomenon or architectural splendor. The reader also documents the series of site-specific art projects entitled The Finissage of Stadium X curated by Joanna Warsza and provides them with a theoretical context.
The Stadium was built in 1955 from the rubble of a war-devastated, and was to preserve Communism’s good name for forty years. In the early 1990s it fell into ruin, being at the same time ‘revived’ by Vietnamese intelligentsia-cum-vendors and Russian traders, pioneers of capitalism. Jarmark Europa suddenly became the only multicultural site in the city, a storehouse of biographies and urban legends, as well as a major tourist attraction. The heterotopic logic of the place and its long-standing (non)presence in the middle of Warsaw brought about the series of art projects, and later this reader.
Over the course of time, the 10-th Anniversary Stadium which is now being erased form the map of Warsaw will likely become some distant planet, while the present publication, with the brilliant contributions from its authors, will attain — perhaps — the status of an unreal story about a place that, after all, never was. www.stadion-x.pl

Stadium X – A Place That Never Was – a Reader
Edited by Joanna Warsza
Contributing authors: Claire Bishop, Sebastian Cichocki, Benjamin Cope, Halina Galera, Ewa Majewska, Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat, Warren Niesłuchowski, Marek Ostrowski, Grzegorz Piątek, Cezary Polak, Anda Rottenberg, Roland Schöny, Pit Schultz, Tomasz Stawiszyński, Barbara Sudnik-Wójcikowska, Stach Szabłowski, Ngô Văn Tưởng. Bilingual issue: PL/ENG. Published by: Bęc Zmiana Foundation & Korporacja Ha!art
www.ha.art.pl

The book was sponsored by the City of Warsaw and Narodowe Centrum Sportu www.stadioncity.pl

Under a dark underpass down the busy Łazienkowska Route, that divides two picturesque parks: Agrykola Park and Park na Skarpie, dozens of colorful (red, yellow and green) lamps have been attached as a result of an idea of Jakub Szczęsny, an architect. Whenever someone appears in the area during a night, light flash sequences brighten up the darkness. Simple conception based on spotlighting effect is meant to modify the perception of the public space. It is also an invitation for a walk, an answer to night flanuers' needs and an attempt of a city’s synchronization.

The light installation by Jakub Szczęsny is a part of the project SYNCHRONICITY_Warsaw. Projects for the Future Warsaw and is coordinated by the Bęc Zmiana Foundation. More information at www.synchronicity.pl

Time: from 15th September
Start up: after dark, in collaboration with plan B and plac zabaw
Place: Warsaw, the archway under the Łazienkowska Route in the Agrykola Park

<<< photo: Drążek

Supported by the Capital City of Warsaw

An excerpt from the introduction to the Notes.for.collectors
by Piotr Bazylko and Krzysztof Masiewicz

"It is astounding that there are still no books on the Polish market allowing the understanding of the most contemporary art market. In our publication we tried to show that — contrary to popular opinion — it is not a mystic territory reserved solely to wealthy snobs, and that the only true requirement is the need for constant education. Well... and maybe some guts, too.
You can start collecting newest art in many ways, according to your abilities and the need to surround yourself with unique objects. This publication aims to encourage making the first step.
The final shape of this publication is a result of many a compromise. A bilingual edition initially planned took on this form only partially. The part describing the Polish art market from the fall of communism until today is only in English and is addressed mainly to the foreign reader. The “how-to” part is, on the other hand, addressed specifically to the Polish reader. The supplement, however, in which the most interesting “young names” on the Polish art market, the most important works made in the recent years, as well as basic information on the Polish and international art market can be found is intended for everyone. We hope you will enjoy our work!"

Authors: Piotr Bazylko & Krzysztof Masiewicz    www.artbazaar.blogspot.com

Notes.for.collectors is free of charge and can be found in galleries, museums of contemporary art, in selected cafes in Poland, in the Bec Zmiana Foundation Office in Warsaw, and on http://bec.art.pl/notes.php [download PDF].

Published thanks to financial support from Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation

Supported by:

     Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Republic of Poland: Operational Program Promoting of Reading

    The Capital City of Warsaw

The map of Warsaw is made for young travellers. It presents 103 spots in the city chosen by travellers, young inhabitants and owners of hostels in Warsaw. The map was made in cooperation with USE-IT EUROPE, which is tourist info for young people and Promotion Dept. of the City Hall of Warsaw.
USE-IT publications contain information that young travellers really need. Where are the free concerts? If there’s one museum I have to see, which one? How can I stop looking lie a tourist?
USE-IT publications are made by young people for young people. People like advice from their equals, so USE-IT publications usually include portraits of locals as well (with picture) - young people telling what they think about the city, or giving a special tip. USE-IT does not make publications with „something for everybody”. But chooses to aim at a specific target with specific needs.

Text: Grzegorz Piątek, Design and illustration: Dominik Cymer www.nobdepot.com & Rafał Szczepaniak www.rafal-szczepaniak.com

The map is free of charge and can be found in hostels in Warsaw, Krakow, Wroclaw, Poznan, Gdansk, in the Bec Zmiana Foundation Office in Warsaw, and on www.use-it-warsaw.pl [download PDF A4 format].

Warsaw is one of the biggest capitals of New Europe. It’s problematic past is still visible not only in the dysfunctional city structure. What is even more characteristic is an obvious lack of dynamism and vision in the municipal policy observed from the beginning of liberalization in Poland. The city seems to be paralyzed by the syncope of political elections, an impossibility of continuing any long-term plans and an obvious myopia of local authorities when it comes to the evaluation of Warsaw’s potential. Lack of vision doesn’t show only in the elaboration and execution of masterplans, it’s other side is the lack of idea “what” Warsaw should become, what are this city’s ambitions, how Warsaw should be perceived and marketed.
Our exhibition’s main idea is to show to Warsaw public- from simple every-day bread consumers , through planners, to local politicians that working on the vision requires a confrontation and openness towards different perspectives not necessarily belonging to the standard range of tools used in municipal planning. The perspective can be large, intentional, subversive, analytical or intuitive and it’s main value is the one of a daring, uncastrated thought that embraces the future instead of fearing it.
For this reason we will confront ideas on Warsaw’s future approached by fifteen entities from Asia, Americas, Europe and Australia. Some of them were prepared for different locations (Philadelphia, Seoul, Madrid) and represent examples of what was, according to it’s creators, a most appropriate answer to Warsaw problems. Another group is composed out of projects prepared especially for the Polish capital, but still basing on a vague idea of Warsaw. The third group will be composed out of two projects starting from a hipothesis and developed through analytical work. This way we will show both instinctive and analytical approach.
The exhibition is composed out of two opposed projects:
1. No Hear No See
13 projects by different world architects elaborated or chosen from previous work on basis of ignorance and sensations on Warsaw actual situation instead of deep, multilayer analysis. The projects were published in “W (is for Warsaw)” book by Fundacja Bęc Zmiana.
2. Deep Submergence
Three projects by Centrala Designer’s Task Force Warsaw), S'A ARQUITECTOS + Esestudio (Lisbon/ Barcelona) and by RaumLabor (Berlin) collective starting with a hipothesis and leading towards clearly expressed conclusions, where the visual realism is less important than a direct and convincing representation of analytical outcome. Due to time limitations the projects will allow a “deep submergence” into only one chosen field of research as base for the vision development. The research fields can be: social, economical, ecological, geopolitical, historical, climatic or geographic.

www.synchronicity.pl

Curator: Jakub Szczęsny (Centrala / www.centrala.net.pl)
Organizer: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana

Project supported by the City of Warsaw
Partner: Goethe-Institut Warschau

Stadiums and borders are meant to build the national identity. Whereas the stadiums are the real architectural objects constructed within few years; borders are the products of our imagination. They are in fact consisting of contracts, performativ acts, symbols and potential violence. Borders and stadiums are supposed to tell us, who we are. Berlin - Bern group SCHAUPLATZ INTERNATIONAL will recreate in the middle of the lawn a fragment of the polish eastern border in 1:1 scale. An observation point will be constructed on the crown of the Stadium. Look at it in all it's beauty and misery. In this space of multi-meaning and contradiction, past and future SCHAUPLATZ INTERNATIONAL wants to cool down.
Until recently Frontex was located near the 10TH-ANNIVERSARY STADIUM. Frontex, the EU agency based in Warsaw, is responsible for the border security in Europe. In cooperation with the police, the army and the secret service Frontex is organizing the intervention groups, people hunting and charter deportation. In consequence the emigrants are using more and more dangerous ways to pass the borders. Frontex's employees, on their way to work, were passing every day by the Stadium and the market – the place that was dividing people in legal and illegal ones.
The artists were inspired by the phenomenon of the Stadium - built from the ruins of Warsaw as a monument of the communist regime, then the seat of the pioneers of the capitalism, the only place diverse culturally where the emigrants gathered, the meta-ruin. Very soon the new National Stadium for Euro 2012 will be built on this location. The amazing contrast between the derelict monument with the new, bottom-up energy of the traders and the emigrants, the architecture of the future, questioned procedures of Frontex and all other unknown features – will create the climax of the control observation point. Just sit and watch.

Curator of the Finissage: Joanna Warsza

        Project supported by City of Warsaw

Organizers: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana i Fundacja Laury Palmer
Patronage: Ministerstwo Sportu i Turystyki
Partners: Szwajcarska Fundacja dla kultury Pro Helvetia, Narodowe Centrum Sportu, Centralny Ośrodek Sportu, CHD Stadion, Orfi, teleskopy.pl, mamastudio

www.stadion-x.pl

Sunday, 15th June, 2008 from 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.
admission free, entrance next to the tunnel from Al. Zieleniecka

annas kollektiv is an interdisciplinary group of two dancers, two architects and a video artist. Since 1999 annas kollektiv has created site-specific work and has aimed at offering new views on public spaces. The artists confront the architecture as a potential city-set raising questions about social, urban and culture meanings that are generated by it. Their performances are also dematerializing the architecture objects – through e.g. optical disturbance of gravitation, changing the emergency exit systems, using light effects. annas kollektiv shows are often inscribed into the subterranean parkings, high-rise buildings or train stations. During the two weeks residency in Warsaw the Swiss artists will prepare a performance in the ex-communist X-Anniversary Stadium, built after the 2nd WW with the ruins of the city, which has now become a construction site for new Stadium for Euro 2012. Based on space, sound, light and movement the show will serve as artistic acupuncture showing the disappearing parts of the monumental sport place – such as historic slices of tribunes, tunnels entrance, lawn in flowers, points of pillaring. The Swiss collective, inspired by the architecture of the Stadium as a multilayered space of history, will offer its own interpretation of this outstanding and disappearing place, which have never been discussed as a valuable heritage of the social realism period.
With: Anna Bürgi, Martin Bölsterli, Boris Hitz, Katrin Oettli, Deborah Suhner
Music by: m.Bunio.s

Curator of the Finissage: Joanna Warsza

        Project supported by City of Warsaw

Organizers: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana i Fundacja Laury Palmer
Patronage: Ministerstwo Sportu i Turystyki
Partners: Szwajcarska Fundacja dla kultury Pro Helvetia, Narodowe Centrum Sportu, Centralny Ośrodek Sportu, CHD Stadion, Orfi, BENQ, mamastudio

www.stadion-x.pl

Sunday, 31st May, 2008 10:00 p.m.
entrance next to the tunnel from Al. Zieleniecka

The graphic form of “notes.na.6.tygodni” (“6.Week.Notebook”) is a result of our principles of substance and our modest financial potential: maximum information, in the most up-to-date design form, on minimum space.
This all makes us the more happy to learn that “notes.na.6.tygodni” received a merit award at the prestigious graphic design contest, European Design Awards 2008.
The Notebook owes the award for layout to two outstanding graphic designers of the young generation: Małgorzata Gurowska, author of covers, and author of the layout, Grzegorz Laszuk.
The jury, which consisted of graphic designers and representatives of 12 graphic design magazines (inter alia “TYPO” / Czech Republic, “Etapes” / France, “Progetto grafico” / Italy, “Eye” / Great Britain, “2+3D” / Poland), judged works sent from all over Europe in several categories.
The awards were given during a gala event in Stockholm on May 18, which took place at the time of the ED-Conference. The conference, in which the most interesting and significant graphic designers from all over Europe took part, lasted a couple of days. The Notebook received merit in the “magazine” category for issues 30-38 published in 2007.
“notes.na.6.tygodni” has been published since 2003 as a project run by the Bęc Zmiana Foundation. It is available in over 100 spots nationwide. It has a circulation of 3000 copies. It is a two-times winner of the Chimera International Publication Design Contest in the category for best magazine (2004 and 2007).
“notes.na.6.tygodni” could not come out without the support from our readers (thank you!), grants and the generosity of our sponsors. We have been receiving partial funding from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage / “Promotion of Reading” Operational Programme for the last three years. We have also received a grant in the City of Warsaw City Hall’s Office of Culture contest for the years 2008-2010. In 2007 we received support from Orange; in 2008 from Plus. Since its first issue the Notebook has been receiving backing from Arctic Paper Poland.

www.ed-awards.com

On the market around Stadion Dziesięciolecia there is a system of loudspeakers used for giving opening hours, making announcements, and providing other administrative information. The RADIO STADION BROADCASTS project will transform this local public address system into a weekend radio station. Its programme will be drawn up based on suggestions by the vendors from all over the world who trade at the market, and will be broadcast in their own languages. The original inspiration for the project came from a piece by the Danish artist Jens HAANING, who broadcasted jokes in Turkish over a loudspeaker in the main square in Copenhagen. His installation created a community of laughter among Turkish emigrants, and temporarily inverted their situation by making the majority feel excluded for once.

The RADIO STADION BROADCASTS project uses an everyday means of communication to create an ephemeral participatory acoustic space blurring territorial, symbolic, and identity boundaries. The idea relies on the inability of the general public to understand programmes in the native languages of the vendors (sports commentary in Vietnamese, political manifestos in Arabic, news in Russian etc). Deriving from the concepts of radio art, the project will create a micro-society of listeners and performers made up of people who have been subtly enriching the homogenous landscape of the post-communist city since 1989.

The broadcasting will be prepared by Jacek Skolimowski and Adam Witkowski from Radio Simulator and Pit Schultz and Diana McCarty from Berlin backyardradio. Backyard Radio snatches the radio from tv towers and broadcasting agencies and instead of showering down on the city, the radio waves beam out of the districts and neighborhoods. The seat of backyardradio is now Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

Project by: Jacek Skolimowski & Adam Witkowski
Curator of the Finissage: Joanna Warsza
Coordination: Zuza Sikorska

Organizers: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana i Fundacja Laury Palmer
Patronage: Ministerstwo Sportu i Turystyki
Partners: Centralny Ośrodek Sportu, CHD Stadion, Szkoła Wyższa Psychologii Społecznej, Chłodna 25, Fundacja Forum Różnorodności, Kontynent Warszawa, Mamastudio, ORFI

        Project supported by City of Warsaw

www.stadion-x.pl

Sunday, 27th April, 2008 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
admission free, access from Rondo Waszyngtona

<<< poster by: MamaStudio www.mamastudio.pl

2007
Chimera International Publication Design Contest: Gold Chimera in the category Magazine, Silver Chimera in the category Table of Contents, and Bronze Chimera in the category Typography for “notes.na.6.tygodni” magazine (“6-week Notebook”);

“Gazeta Wyborcza” weekly supplement “Co Jest Grane” readers’ cultural award Wdecha 2007 in the category Event of the Year for “Boniek!” performance, the first part of the 10th-Anniversary Stadium and Europe Market closing;

2006
Civis Polonicus Foundation’s merit award for achievements on the project “Searching for Warsaw Citizens’ Models”;

2004
“Gazeta Wyborcza” weekly supplement “Co Jest Grane” readers’ cultural award Wdecha 2004 in the category Event of the Year for Hanna Kokczyńska’s and Luiza Marklowska’s “Pink Glowing Deer” project carried out by the Vistula river;

Chimera International Publication Design Contest award in the category New Magazine Launch received for an innovative approach to magazine design for "notes.na.6.tygodni" magazine.

Is it true that the further away you stand, the more you see?
Can Warsaw be seen from far away? From how far?
What comes to mind when you think of Warsaw?
Invited by us curator and art critic Sebastian Cichocki, architect Jakub Szczęsny and urban planner Krzysztof Nawratek asked artists, atchitects and theorists from all over the world to make their own statements on Warsaw. We did not look for descriptions of reality or simple associations. We searched for intuitions, clouds of afterimages, traces of overheard news, echos.

Part 1 Warsaw Does Not Exist* (Sebastian Cichocki)
Bas van Beek, Daniela Brahm, Pavel Büchler, Caner Büyükgökmen, Yane Calovski, Lawrence English, Cevdet Erek, Bjorn Hegardt, Little Warsaw, Rainer Ganahl, Scott Hayes, Hristina Ivanoska, Wolfgang Mahler, Antje Majewski, Nikoleta Marković, Marko Mäetamm, Hatake Nakemura, Ahmet Ögüt, Anu Pennanen, Khaled D. Ramadan, Markku Peltola, Sean Snyder, Nedko Solakov, Franziska Wicke, Florian Zeyfang

Part 2 Capital  of the Universe (Krzysztof Nawratek)
Jacek Dukaj, Philippe Fayeton, Florian Koch

Part 3 SYNCHRONICITY 1: No Hear, No See (Jakub Szczęsny)
Dorell Ghotmeh Tane Architects, Ecosistema Urbano, Elegant Embellishments, Husos, IwamotoScott Architecture, JHG Jorge Hernandez de la Garza, Kokkugia, Mass Studies, O-S-A, R.A.M.A.D.O.W.N., StudioBasar, Fabio Schillaci, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss

Looking for W? +CLICK

<<<Illustration: Bjorn Hegardt

Every hundredth citizen of Warsaw is originally from Vietnam. However, they are invisible in the city that is almost monocultural. The only place one can notice their existence is Vietnamese part of the Jarmark Europa Market. Students and educated people, quite often with their PhD, created this spot in early 90's so that they could work and at the same time were able to use the polish economic prosperity in order to become successful. Lately, many questions have arisen because of the idea of closing down the Jarmark Europa Market: What will happen with Vietnamese people after that? Is it truth that they decide to return to their homeland, because of the polish political situation? What do we know about the Vietnamese minority - the biggest minority in Poland?During the debate a short movie about Vietnamese, who are back to Hanoi was presented and conversation between Ton Van Anh (activist and journalist), Teresa Halik, PhD (Vietnam specialist), Paweł Boski, PhD (psychologist) and Joanna Warsza (curator of the project) was held.

Curator of the Finissage: Joanna Warsza

Organizers: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, Fundacja Laury Palmer, Krytyka Polityczna
Patronage: Ministerstwo Sportu i Turystyki
Partners: Centralny Ośrodek Sportu, CHD Stadion, Mamastudio        

www.stadion-x.pl

Sunday, 16th December, 2007, 7:00 p.m.
Place: Warsaw, REDakcja Krytyki Politycznej, Chmielna 26 apt. 19

Inspections of the site are usually held in the place where something important has happened, and afterwards eyewitnesses try to report this situation. The second episode of Finissage of the Stadium X was formed on the basis of the inspection of the site and on the idea of meeting people who have been connected to the Stadium: Stanisław Królak (remarkable cyclist of the Peace Race), Janusz Zaorski (film director and a sport fan), traders from the Jarmark Europa Market, Euro 2012 planners and Adam Roman (sculptor), to name a few.
The second part of the episode was the lecture about art and the public sphere by Stéphane Noël as well as presentation of “Boniek!” - movie by Marcin Latałło.

Curators of the Finissage: Joanna Warsza & Cezary Polak

Organizers: Fudacja Bec Zmiana, Fundacja Laury Palmer, Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego-Festiwal Niewinni Czarodzieje
Patronage: Ministerstwo Sportu i Turystyki
Partners: CHD Stadion, Centralny Ośrodek Sportu, Szwajcarska Fundacja dla Kultury Pro Helvetia, Fundacja dla Wolności, klub Chłodna 25, mamastudio

www.stadion-x.pl

Sunday, 18th November 2007, Part I – 12 a.m. Stadium X entrance from Wybrzeże Szczecińskie // Part II – 7:00 p.m. Chłodna 25 Club, www.chlodna25.blog.pl

A report from border territories. A provocation toward the furniture business. An answer to the users’ unvoiced needs. A mass-production proposal. An invitation to consumption. Authors, artists and designers invited: Janusz Łukowicz, Tomek Rygalik, Hubert Czerepok, Bartosz Mucha, Gogo (Piotr Stolarski, Maria Makowska), Joanna Jurczak, Beza (Zofia Strumiłło, Anna Łoskiewicz), AZE (Anna Kotowicz, Artur Puszkarewicz), Massmix. The exhibition was shown during the Łódź Design International Festival, a first-time event of this kind in Poland dedicated to design in its broadest sense.

SIn the presence of hundreds of spectators Massimo Furlan, a Swiss performer (www.massimofurlan.com) made a one-man reconstruction of one of the most spectacular football matches in the history of the Polish team: Poland-Belgium (3:0) at the 1982 FIFA World Cup in Spain. The artist brought back the famous game from the “choreographic” point of view of the key football player, Zbigniew Boniek. The match took place at 2:10 pm and was commented “live” by Tomasz Zimoch, a famed sport commentator, and was transmitted by Radio Kampus 97,1 FM.
The 10th-Anniversary Stadium, nowadays a devastated multifunctional sports stadium was always a place serving not only sports but also public shows and spectacular events. It is a piece of Polish history, memory and a witness of the transformation from communism to capitalism. The stadium is to be transformed for UEFA European Football Championship 2012, and a sports hall will be built in place of the football pitch.
25 years ago, on July 10, 1982 the Polish football team won third place at the World Cup in Spain. Coach Antoni Piechniczek’s team repeated the success of Kazimierz Górski’s team from 1974. Zbigniew Boniek enchanted (striking 3 goals) in the match with Belgium (3:0) in the second round of the World Cup. One of the newspapers in Brussels read the following day: “Boniek Butcher of Belgium Hearts!”.
Furlan’s projects often relate to childhood images and memories. The voice of the radio commentator getting out of open windows in a deserted city is one of such memories. Furlan lives in Lausanne, where he makes theatre plays (recently “Palo Alto” and “Les filles et les garcons”) and performance events.

Watch on You Tube: Akcja "Boniek!"

Curator of the Finissage: Joanna Warsza

Organizers: Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, Fundacja Laury Palmer, Radio Kampus, Stołeczna Estrada, Szwajcarska Fundacja dla Kultury Pro Helvetia
Patronage: Ministerstwo Sportu i Turystyki
Partners: CHD Stadion, TVP Kultura, on board Public Relations, EURO RSCG,  Mamastudio

www.stadion-x.pl 

Sunday, 14th October, 2007 4:15 p.m.
access from Wybrzeże Szczecińskie

It took us some time to renovate the Loop Bench. The project by Przemek Kaczkowski i Jacek Piotrowski was placed in Świętokrzyski Park beside The Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw in June 2004 thanks to support from the Institute of Italian Culture. It was part of Bęc Zmiana New Urban Design Project.
Two times the look of the bench was changed: firstly, the seat was wooden; then, the loop disappeared; finally, the bench is more permanent and hopefully no one will try to destroy it.

<<< The Loop Bench by Przemek Kaczkowski i Jacek Piotrowski, 2004

<<< The Loop Bench, 2006

 <<< The Loop Bench, 2007

Support of Joanna Rajkowska’s “Dotleniacz” (“Oxygenator”) project, shown on Plac Grzybowski in Warsaw; seats constructed by designers of the young generation: K.Myk benches and urban sofas designed for the Urban Objects New Fair—the previous accomplishments of the Foundation in 2007—were handed over.

http://www.rajkowska.com/en/oxygenator.php

In Warsaw the best is often hidden behind the scenes.  We have put together this edition of Notes from Warsaw to bring you everything you won’t find in the conventional guide books. You need a good guide to appreciate fully the taste of this eclectic urban cocktail. Without a friend to take you to the clubs scattered in the most surprising of places, to the galleries in the private apartments, to the courtyards and backyards…you might end up a bit disappointed. The unfinished buildings and abandoned projects mean that Warsaw is one of the greenest cities in the world. You can walk across this city of 2 million without ever really leaving a park. Splitting the city in half is a lazily flowing unregulated river. In Warsaw you can find exclusive night clubs on the top floor of communist-era tower blocks, an Asian bazaar in a soccer stadium, a one-line underground that terminates in a forest, a faux-palm tree in the center of a downtown intersection, and a stock market in the former communist-party headquarters.
More on: notesfromwarsaw.blogspot.com


Publication was published thanks to the financial support of City of Warsaw.

The event is a presentation of designs made by leading architects and designers from all over the country: GOGO, BEZA, PUFF PUFF, as well as db2_architekci, Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Dariusz Sirojć, Tamizo and Tomasz Zaleski, during the Wroclaw Non Stop Festival 2007. For the duration of the Festival the New Fair square was filled with a scene, info box, internet café, lounge area, bar, seats, and a viewing platform—all of their design. The project was carried out by The Bęc Zmiana Foundation together with The ReWritable Research Team (architects: Romek Rutkowski and Łukasz Wojciechowski), at the invitation of the Wroclaw Non Stop Festival. The project was carried out thanks to the help of the Municipality of Wroclaw City Promotion Office.

<<< Urban Sofa by GOGO (Piotr Stolarski & Maria Makowska) www.gogo.com.pl

Designed by Michał Kwasieborski (Department of Industrial Design, Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts) K.MYK benches received 2nd prize in the Warsaw Chief Architect’s Office park bench student contest in 2006. The benches were placed in Pole Mokotowskie.

The project was carried out thanks to the help of the City of Warsaw.

Sponsors: NESTEA, AMS.

<<< P.BBLE on a billboard, project: Kobas Laksa

<<< P.BBLE  in a pond, photo: Marta Zasępa

BĘC IN ACTION >>> 2002-2006

Photonotes.for.6.weeks /August 2006/, cover photo by Kobas Laksa >>>www.kbx.pl

Design contest rganised together with the City of Warsaw Promotion Office and the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts Department of Industrial Design. “Squeezes from Warsaw”, symbols of the capital designed by Maja Kaczyńska in the shape of relaxing latex “squeezes”, received an award and, as well as a number of other projects made for that contest, were produced and used to promote the city during national and international fairs, conferences etc.

The outcome of the contest was exhibited at Czuły Barbarzyńca in Warsaw from April to June 2007.

Organizers: Biuro Promocji Urzędu Miasta st. Warszawy, Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, Wydział Wzornictwa Przemysłowego ASP w Warszawie

<<<Maja Kaczyńska: Uściski z Warszawy / Squeezes from Warsaw

Kino.Lab Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Red Bull: outdoor furniture for the summer cinema; Collegium Civitas: postcard advertising the university; Museum of the History of Polish Jews: temporary installation announcing the construction of the Museum building, open since September 2006.

<<< furniture for the summer cinema by Lech Rowiński

Exhibition of designs made by the youngest generation of architects, designers and artists as part of the Warsaw of the Future project, under the patronage of the City of Warsaw Chief Architect’s Office. The exhibition was shown near the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw; it was accompanied by a series of free postcards distributed in cafés and galleries.

<<Project by Witek Wyczański

Presentation of designs from the New Urban Design Project-Beach series, new architecture/design/art at the interface of city-water. The exhibition was accompanied by a series of free postcards distributed in cafés and galleries. Clear Channel was partner in the exhibition.

Publication of the book “Warsaw, Time and Space” presenting statements of eminent scholars (inter alia Halina Taborska, Jerzy Bralczyk, Roch Sulima, Wiesław Godzic) on Warsaw’s space; the book was illustrated with designs made by the youngest generation of architects, designers and artists.

Organizers: Biuro Naczelnego Architekta Miasta, Fundacja Nowej Kultury Bęc Zmiana
Cooperation: Wydział Wzornictwa Przemysłowego ASP, Pracownia Sztuki w Przestrzeni Publicznej ASP, Katedra Projektowania Architektury Przemysłowej i Wielkoprzemysłowej Politechniki Warszawskiej, Szkoła Wyższa Psychologii Społecznej

Hanna Kokczyńska and Luiza Marklowska study design in Warsaw. A year ago (2003), they came up with two projects originally commissioned for the Warsaw Metro: the Glowing Pink Deer, as well as Blue Birds (the latter together with Przemysław Matuszak). - Both visions were meant to jazz up the moody, dull-gray city space of Warsaw - the authors say. - In either project we combined sharp colors with light; either one flirts with kitsch.
Since August 2004, the flock of pink deer found its abode by the Wisła river, not far from the University Library complex. The deer were awarded “Gazeta Wyborcza” readers’ prize for the coolest artistic event in Warsaw in 2004.
The two designers seriously admire the deer lifestyle: 7 hours per day for eating; 7 hours for chewing; 3 hours’ sleep; and the balance for personal life is disturbingly similar to their own daily Schedule : )
A redeemer-deer endowed with a human voice is the staple of European Christian lore, and miraculous savings are its strongest suit. In many mythologies, the deer is a middleman between heaven and earth. It stands for speed and longevity. “In the Chinese tradition, the deer is the only creature able to find the immortality mushroom; when the deer enters its 1000th year of life, it becomes blue. At 1500 years of age, it becomes white; black at 2000”, Władysław Kopaliński notes in his Dictionary of Symbols.
Meanwhile, young deer are pink. They watch closely what the future holds for them, and they are filled with the light of the rising sun.
Sculptoral assistance with the Pink Deer project: Edyta Makaruk

Pink Glowing Deer are sponsored by: Vattenfall Poland

<<<Photo by: Kobas Laksa / www.kbx.pl

The Bęc Zmiana Foundation prides itself on promoting Polish culture, facilitating meetings between young artists and their public. Bęc Zmiana creates a path for an undisturbed flow of energy, ideas and thoughts by helping to exhibit the work of younger generation artists in public spaces,. We do not interpret art - we tunnel it.

One of the Foundation's main activities is the publication of a non-profit magazine "notes.na.6.tygodni” (6-week notebook) dedicated to the presentation of current cultural events, new generation Polish art. architecture, design, photography and music. Each issue of the "notes.na.6.tygodni” magazine has a section designed by a different graphic artists of the rising generation. All issues of this publication are also available on the Internet.