Basia Bańda’s most recent project, Daily News – Warsaw, which has been created specially for the Zachęta Project Room, features collages with elements of drawing, and sculptural objects. The project was inspired by news headlines published by the Warsaw edition of the web portal Gazeta.pl. 

Christian Hutzinger’s W/W is an installation that combines painting and architecture. In a previously unused space, the artist has placed his trademark elements: a letter, a geometric figure, and colour. These play with the ‘inconvenient’ architecture of a basement niche, stressing its function as an ‘entrance/exit’ or ‘introduction’ to what awaits inside. The letter ‘W’, with its many meanings, is a sign that the artist plays with on every possible level.

Polish Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia
Konrad Smoleński Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More

This project is a continuation of the previous explorations of this artist, who, being active for over a decade in the domain of visual arts, focusses his interest on sound.

The exhibition explores the paradigm shift of “being an artist”. During the past 20 years, artists have been forced to redefine their place on the map of social roles and economical interdependences. A stark example of this transformation that took on quite a radical form was the artists' strike in May 2012, initiated by the Civic Forum for Contemporary Art. This topic constructed a bracket for this exhibition that was largely inspired by the libretto of the first national German opera by Carl Maria von Weber's entitles Freelancer (premiered in 1821).

Zachęta – National Gallery of Art will present the first individual exhibition in Poland of the work of Peter Land – one of the best-known contemporary artists from Denmark. The show will comprise a selection of projects from different periods of the artist's activity. Major part of the show will consist of films and video installations created from the mid-90s, in which the author appears in different costumes and slapstic situation.

Other City is a documentary photographic project that attempts to visually map the area of the Jewish ghetto (Warsaw Ghetto, 1940–1943) created by Nazi Germany in the heart of the Polish capital. The artists photograph the area from the rooftops and top floors of buildings using a 4x5 inch-sheet camera. They work from autumn to spring, on sunless days, avoiding chiaroscuro and trying to avoid capturing foliage as this blurs the street grid and alters the modelling of solid figures. The project is in colour, which is perceived by the artists as more realistic and natural than black-and-white photography.

A project by students of Łukasz Skąpski at the Art Academy in Szczecin. A direct inspiration for the exhibition at the Zachęta Project Room was a signing of a bill that legalized in Poland the registration and trading of genetically modified seeds.  At large, displayed works focus on the issues revolving around transgenic crops.

The Rise and Fall of Air is the second part of sculptor Katarzyna Krakowiak’s ‘architectural trilogy’, following Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers, which received a special mention at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. It is not however a simple relocation of her intervention in the Polish Pavilion.

Romuald Broniarek, Aleksander Jałosiński, Bogdan Łopieński, Jan Morek, Wojciech Plewiński, Tadeusz Rolke

These six photographers – the oldest of them born in 1928, the youngest in 1940 – spent most of their professional lives in communist Poland. All of them worked for official presstitles. This exhibition of photographs, however, is an unofficial portrait of those times. The photos do not show government ceremonies, hierarchically framed heads of state or the heroes of propaganda reports. The people presented in the photographs are not at work: they are at leisure, using their time freely.