2025

When I came to Turkey to study for my PhD, I imagined a very different future for myself. In 2017, mass arrests of Uyghurs took place in my hometown, and this changed the course of my dreams. (...) On 3 September 2024, I finished the eight-year stage of my life in Turkey and flew to Warsaw.

To broaden the knowledge of dance and choreography, WOK is preparing a series of conversations with dance practitioners entitled What will dance make of us? developed by Joanna Leśnierowska. The aim of the series is to find answers to the question: What can regular contact with dance, and experiencing and practising it, offer us, each of us individually, and us as a community?

2025 is another year in which digital technology occupies a prominent place in publicdiscourse, capturing imaginations and challenging long-held beliefs and behaviors. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Gemini and ChatGPT, means people now have access to tools that can support their work and creativity. However, these tools can also stifle creativity and take over difficult and often tedioustasks that require reflection, patience and time.

How does the experience of motherhood change people working in artistic professions? How does it affect their professional situation and daily work? What kind of challenge is the attempt to combine the professional sphere with caregiving responsibilities?

The Warsaw Observatory of Culture (WOK) has completed the call for the third edition of the WOK Artistic and Research Residencies programme in 2025. After seventeen interviews during the second stage of the call, the committee, consisting of Anna Bieliz, Prot Jarnuszkiewicz, Łucja Krzyżanowska, Maryna Tomaszewska and Paweł Sztarbowski, invited the following ten people, who received the highest scores, to join the 2025 programme:

Break or breakthrough? Accompanying creatives and researchers in their development

Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute, and the Warsaw Observatory of Culture (WOK) invite you to the event “Mobile Artists: How to Support Artists on the Move” on 25 April at 14:00. The event will take place in a hybrid format: on-site at the cinema hall of Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (Jazdów 2, Warsaw) and will be streamed live on YouTube. The event will be held in English. Admission is free.

Every year, over 200 people graduate from art schools in Warsaw. To continue their artistic practice, they need a place to work, however, access to spaces and tools that would enable creative work is limited. New spaces to create art are becoming increasingly rare in Warsaw. That is why we at the Warsaw Observatory of Culture (WOK) are looking for solutions and new ways of thinking about the role of art studios–and artistic work–in the urban environment. In collaboration with the Puszka Foundation, we are running research and mentoring activities aimed at developing new ways of thinking about artists' studios and models of creative work, bringing together stakeholders and providing young artists with the knowledge they need to practice their art without restraints in Warsaw.

The Committee, composed of Anna Bieliz, Prot Jarnuszkiewicz, Łucja Krzyżanowska, Paweł Sztarbowski, and Maryna Tomaszewska, would like to thank all the applicants for their submissions. WOK presented us with the important andchallenging task of selecting just a few of the many amazing ideas. We were deeply moved by the sincerity and seriousness of your applications.

The first meetings of the Co-thinking project, which were networking sessions for people involved in artistic research, paved the way for self-examination and self-organisation activities that we intend to develop as an informal group. This text is, therefore not a summary of a completed project, but an account of an ongoing process. It is also a snippet of a heterogeneous, polyphonic archive of cooperation and a preview of our future activities. We plan to gradually share other parts of this archive, starting with a story about the facilitation experience from the perspective of the people responsible for supporting the group process.
We plan to gradually share other parts of this archive, starting with a story about the facilitation experience from the perspective of the persons responsible for supporting the group process.

In December 2024, we completed the second edition of the WOK residency, conducted in line with the motto ‘Break or Breakthrough’. During this residency, we supported the individual creative processes of 13 people (five of whom formed two collectives). We now give them the floor to talk about their experiences.

Does the arts sector in Europe have a collective responsibility for artists who have been
relocated or displaced due to persecution or abuse of their human rights? I would say yes, the
arts sector everywhere is vulnerable and often marginal, relative to other sectors.

The text examines the fleeting nature of space, cultural memory and identity, giving the transnational examples on the complexity of the phenomenon of belonging.

Accompanying artists and researchers in their development.

To, że instytucje i podmioty kultury w Warszawie nie istnieją w próżni – jest oczywistym stwierdzeniem. Jednak zrozumienie krajobrazu, jaki tworzą oraz ekosystemu, w jakim funkcjonują: a więc własnych, wewnętrznych uwarunkowań oraz sieci relacji z innymi podmiotami, w jakich się znajdują – wymaga pilnej i wnikliwej analizy. Badanie ekosystemu warszawskiej kultury rzuca nowe światło na współpracę, tożsamość oraz potencjały instytucji kultury w mieście. W szerszym kontekście, badanie tworzy lepszy grunt do eksploracji pojęcia odporności instytucji kultury: bardziej systematycznego uchwycenia, czym jest odporność w sektorze kultury w Warszawie oraz rekomendacji, w których kierunkach powinna się ona rozwijać/wzmacniać.