In May 1970, Ewa Partum presented and defended her diploma work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. The following month, as part of the exhibition Information — Imagination — Action. Poster Anti-Biennale
at Współczesna Gallery, she realised Area Managed by Imagination — a material enactment of the concept presented in the theoretical part of her MA thesis. The artist used fragments of this text as a manifesto, which was distributed to the audience to accompany the work. In this manifesto, Partum brought together poetry and art, drawing on the avant-garde tradition of their coexistence. She called for an artistic practice that would generate new modes of perception and unconventional ways of engaging with reality; a practice that would impose a new kind of cognitive sensitivity. Management, understood here as the regulation of relations, aimed to produce ‘intellectual emotion’. In the context of state socialism, pervasive censorship and the language of propaganda, this call to stimulate perception and imagination had an unmistakable political resonance.
Area Managed by Imagination marked the artist’s first opportunity to express herself within the gallery space. By invoking the notion of ‘imagination’, Partum engaged in a critical dialogue with the exhibition format as a venue for presenting artistic facts. She proposed transcending this convention by treating space as an active form understood as an action.