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.

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.

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.

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.

On 7–9 September, a conference on the creation of the Belarusian Institute of Theatre (BIT) was held at WOK.

How can immigrant artistic communities be integrated into the structure of Warsaw's cultural institutions? Can art be used as a tool for integration? This is a summary of a series of presentations held as part of the Future of Culture Forum 2022. The event was organised by the Powszechny Theatre in cooperation with the Warsaw Observatory of Culture.

WOK Lab host the FSH1 platform for Belarusian photographers. On July 12, 2023, a networking meeting was held aimed at people from the Belarusian art community interested in contemporary photography.

Warsaw Observatory of Culture takes part in an artistic residency programme for creators from Belarus and Ukraine, organised by the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute. As a host institution we provide care and support, we try to include the Resident in our networks and partnerships, as well as in the rhythm of the institution's daily work by giving her a chance to get to know how a public cultural institution in Poland functions.

The Warsaw Observatory of Culture (WOK) is the thematic partner of the 5th edition of the Municipal Scholarship Programme. The aim of the programme, which supports doctoral students from all over Poland, is to deepen our understanding of the processes and challenges facing the changing Warsaw and its inhabitants, and to use this knowledge in the development of municipal policies.

On 17–28 March, WOK Lab hosted eighteen participants and four mentors for the curatorial and research activities of Territory in/out.