Past projects

This year’s edition of the International Conference on Cultural Policy Research (ICCPR) will take place at the University of Warsaw from 19–23 August. Anna Galas-Kosil, Deputy Director of the Warsaw Observatory of Culture (WOK), will lead a dedicated panel discussion on how cultural policies can support artists with migration experience.

On Thursday, 6 June 2024, we had the pleasure of tasting chilled kombucha and sampling vegan delicacies at the Warsaw Observatory of Culture, all thanks to the annual meeting with the winners of the City of Warsaw's artistic scholarships, as well as directors and representatives of cultural institutions. We can humbly say that the invited guests had a great time listening to the achievements of the 55 scholarship holders.

At the end of 2023, the Warsaw Observatory of Culture became a member of the international information network supporting artistic and cultural mobility. Today, the network consists of 69 members from 23 countries. Its main objective is to support various stakeholders in the field of culture and arts and to promote mobility as a universal value of professional development.

We are taking the subject of scoliosis out of hospitals and doctors' surgeries and into the public space. The exhibition is the result of five months of meetings aimed at creating a space to share the experience of being a woman with scoliosis. During this participatory process, we met other women with the condition for the first time.

Today, culture is at a crossroads. On the one hand, old practices are still in use; on the other, new values supporting equality and diversity are being promoted. Cultural institutions are particular in that they are the sites of the struggle to change attitudes and ways of working. In a new series of WOK.casts entitled Being a Director, Olga Wysocka and Igor Stokfiszewski attempt to find out how the directors of Warsaw’s cultural institutions are handling change. What strategies do they use in the face of this challenge? What emotions does this provoke?

In Poland, artistic research has been developing for years on the margins of art and science institutions. Although these ephemeral practices are an inexhaustible source of new cognitive strategies, they have not yet found their own place in the cultural field. Their creators lack funding and institutional support, and their work has not received much critical or scholarly commentary that could help deepen our understanding of these practices.

The open-source movement and grassroots creators (makers) have revolutionised the way we think about the creation and distribution of knowledge, technology and products. But what does OPENNESS mean for the creative world today? On April 25th at 18:00, the Warsaw Observatory of Culture (WOK) will host the first event in the SPLOT Open series. The event is dedicated to the theme of OPENNESS and will explore initiatives that embody an open approach in various fields including science, culture, design, art, production, programming and social engagement.

How is the digital revolution changing reading practices? Which diegetic worlds are young people eager to visit and which are no longer accessible to them? The resting education research project, carried out in collaboration with the Culture Bureau of the capital city of Warsaw, provides an opportunity to take a closer look at these questions and juxtapose them with an interdisciplinary reflection on the reading competences of today's readers.

The slogan “It’s just chaos!” is more than the title of an exhibition presented at the WOK Lab space. Each of the exhibited works is an attempt to tell the story of the process of the emergence of an idea and the experience of young artists from the Młodzieżowa Koalicja Performatywna [Youth Performative Coalition].

As part of our partnership with Fundacja Stocznia, we are showing the exhibition Connections at WOK Lab. This exhibition is about connections. About combining art with activism, about creating conditions for collective action, but also about constructing narratives that help bridge different contexts. We believe in the importance of polyphony, but also in the search for common ground.

The paradigm of the artist-mother (and other parents) is changing from one that has historically excluded combining a career in the art world with caring responsibilities, to the increasingly common need to function in both worlds and to fulfil the role of a practising artist on an equal footing with that of a parent.

From January 22nd to February 2nd, 2024, a cohort of 100 professionals, students, and teachers from Ukraine, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Norway, and the UK converged in Warsaw and Lviv with a collective mission to create sustainable solutions addressing Ukraine’s urgent need for a sustainable recovery. Workshop activities took place daily at the WOK Lab space. The main project partners were Umeå University, Umeå School of Architecture, University of Limerick, and Kharkiv School of Architecture.

We invited artists with a migration or refugee experience to walk around Warsaw, to places that are important to them. Their stories, anecdotes and digressions, opinions and emotions are an attempt to answer the question again: how else could it be In Warsaw? Now ahead is a three-day methodological seminar.