Artistic and Research Projects

We believe that knowledge and culture have much to offer and can serve as a platform for mutual conversation and formulating an outlook for the future. We also want to create a space for experimentation and exploration for people working in art and involved in research work. We are interested in non-obvious forms and formats in projects that bridge local practice and global discourse. Like us, our research and artistic processes change over time. In 2023, are core areas of interest include: change, migration, and cultural education.

Together with the dance community, the Culture Bureau of the City of Warsaw, and the Museum of Modern Art, we are working out a formula for a year-long pilot dance programme at the Pavilion on the Vistula River. It is a unique process of shaping the institution in dialogue. We actively respond to the needs of representatives of the dance community and the audience to ensure that the new dance institution becomes an open and welcoming home for artists and a regular meeting place for dance. And for Warsaw to be a significant location on the dance map of Europe.

Contemporary migrations are among the most significant phenomena of the modern world. They are complex and multidimensional issues closely connected to global processes. Migrations alter the images of today’s cities, affecting the Warsaw we live in and shaping the Warsaw of the future. The war in Ukraine and the repressions after the protests in Belarus have intensified the changes that were already visible a few years ago in our part of Europe. Today, the new residents of the Polish capital are no longer only the people who had lived to the east of Poland. The new community of immigrants include people who came here from distant places around the globe, forced to leave their homes due to political, economic, or climatic situations. For some, Poland is a temporary stop, while for others, Warsaw has become their new and perhaps permanent home. Today, we face a new long-term challenge: building a shared space where we can all live and work together.

At the Warsaw Observatory of Culture (WOK), we see many potentials stemming from Warsaw’s rapidly changing social structure. We want to investigate these changes and their impact on culture and create a space where integration processes with their many aspects can take place without restrictions. Our core interests include, in particular, the migrations of artists, curators, researchers, and persons working in the cultural and humanities fields. In our operations, we support the principle ‘nothing about us, without us’endorsed by migrants and refugees., We invite them to participate in common artistic and research projects and reflect on our present and future.

At the Warsaw Observatory of Culture, we know education and culture have a prominent role. In the ever-changing reality, given the new challenges and global and local crises that keep cropping up, we need tools to develop soft social skills and artistic tools, much needed to establish and maintain relationships. This is the rationale for our involvement in studying cultural education in Warsaw, and we made it one of our core programming priorities.

W 2023 roku interesowały nas w szczególności obszary związane z tematem zmiany, migracji i edukacji kulturalnej.