Whose voices are being heard? – post-residence exhibition of artists from Poland and Norway

The power of words in different contexts, languages, images and sounds – from November 10, the BWA Wrocław Główny gallery will host an exhibition that is the creative voice of minority women artists living in Norway and Poland. The exhibition is a summary of the residency stays of female artists working on the other side of the Baltic Sea, who have visited Wroclaw in recent months – and one who has traveled in the opposite direction.

Everything most important happened outside the space of this exhibition. 

Agata Ciastoń, curator

This sentence well describes the presentation at the BWA Wrocław Główny gallery of the effects of the residency stays of six artists, which took place in the spring and summer of this year as part of the Polish-Norwegian program “Whose voices are being heard?”. The artists took up residence in their new surroundings for a while. It became a place for them to ask questions, create, have conversations, emotions and doubts. It was a very intense time, escaping attempts to encapsulate it in the rigid architectural and temporal framework of the exhibition. It’s hard to capture the variety of shared experiences and events in the projects created during this time alone. They are important, but one of many results of processes begun a few months ago. The exhibition, on the other hand, is only a variant of a multi-voiced story.

Persons who were invited to participate in the project experienced a number of difficult moments in their lives, and their artistic paths were sometimes winding. Many times they never got a chance to participate in a residency before, some of them in the flurry of daily duties did not find opportunities to realize their ideas. The residencies therefore became a special event, allowing them to devote themselves entirely to artistic practice, an opportunity to redirect their attention to the creative process. Kine Michelle Bruniera, Lill Yildiz Yalcin, Aliona Pazdniakova, Yachi Shian-Yuan Yang, Ingrid Frivold are artists living in Norway who spent a month in Wroclaw, while Viktoriia Tofan made a reverse trip and went from Wroclaw to the small Norwegian town of Hvitsten for four weeks. The works of all of them will be included in the exhibition, and will include photography, objects, painting, as well as video and sound composition.

The presentation is the voices of female artists with unique experiences and skills. Starting from a meeting in the circumstances of an artistic residency, it emphasises understanding how others think, process information, perceive the world and make decisions – on cognitive diversity. The works are united by sharpness and freshness of outlook, some are even a kind of manifesto in response to church or state interference in private life or the energy crisis. The artists, speaking from their positions as representatives of a minority group, call for inquisitiveness, the courage to, as Donna Harway wants, destabilize worlds of thought with other worlds of thought.

„Whose voices are being heard? Exchange program for foreign artists from Poland and Norway” is co-financed by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway within the EEA Financial Mechanism 2014-2021 under the Culture Programme.

Agata Ciastoń (PL)

Independent curator, researcher and writer. She received her PhD in cultural studies from the University of Wroclaw. She devoted her dissertation to the dynamic relationship between photography and the moving image. For many years she has worked with cultural and educational institutions and publishing houses. She was the originator, coordinator and curator of the group exhibitions Poetry and Performance. Eastern European Perspective (2020) and Monthly Photography 1953-1974 (2017), as well as many individual exhibitions. She has worked with Marta Bogdanska, Ella Littwitz, Tom Swoboda, Netta Laufer, Amir Yatziv and Guy Slabbinck, among others. In her work, she is primarily interested in issues of variously conceived borders and territories. Her projects often revisit issues concerning the ambiguity of landscape and the relationship of humans to the world of animals, plants and things.