The article, which is a part of the author’s B.A. thesis, analyzes the Island by Aleksandra Wasilkowska, a scenic object used in Krzysztof Garbaczewski’s famous performance The Sexual Life of Savages. The author juxtaposes the design of the Island and its impact with Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjects, focusing his reflections on the possibility of an ecocritical reading of the play. In doing so, he tries to answer the question whether The Sexual Life of...

The article discusses the creative methods of Milo Rau and the changes he brought to the NTGent theatre after becoming its artistic director. Rau established a set of 10 principles called the Ghent Manifesto in order to change the traditional operating system of a city theatre. The article also discusses the circumstances behind the creation of La Reprise, the play inspired by a real-life murder of a young gay man in Liège. This opera is...

The author analyses two events from the Warsaw Biennale: the play Refugees (Beata Bandurska, Milena Czarnik, Leyla Elsanova, Luna JJ, Hava Hava, Aleksandra Matlingiewicz, Martyna Peszko, Gulbarg Sayfova, Katarzyna Szyngiera, Jacek Sotomski) involving women who for political and military reasons had to emigrate, and the exhibition Endless Space (curator, exhibition designer: Agata Siwiak; exhibition designer: Agata Kiedrowicz) being the culmination of a long-term work of artists with children and youth. The author brings out the...

The article analyses the media coverage of the accusations of sexual harassment and mobbing made against Henryk Jacek S., a long-time director of the Bagatela Theatre in Krakow, by its female employees. Based on the employees’ statements, the author tries to describe the situation in the theatre before the case was exposed. She refers to the category of ‘ugly feelings’, created and explored by Sianne Ngai, and specifically, to the affect of animatedness, which is...

The article analyses the events that took place in Warsaw on 13 February 2010 during the premiere of Krystian’s Lupa production of "Persona. Ciało Simone" (Persona: Simone’s Body). The actress Joanna Szczepkowska, who played one of the main roles, interrupted the performance for a few seconds by doing three things: she stepped in among the spectators, raised her hand in a Hitler salute and bared her buttocks. The article examines the reasons for the actress’s...

This article covers the work of social arts group C.U.K.T,, which was active in the 1990s. The author situates the phenomena she addresses in the framework of discourses on the Polish transformation. Using the example of C.U.K.T., she inquires into how techno music of the 1990s intersected with post-transformation capitalism, technologies with the project to generate civic and social involvement, and the art market with non-institutional art interventions. She also wonders to what extent the...

The article analyses one of the projects of the Center for Political Beauty – The Dead Are Coming (2015). This operation was a direct response to the disgraceful practices of storing the dead bodies of refugees in plastic garbage bags in a Sicilian hospital and to burial procedures for forced migrants that were deviating from the minimum standards. The collective exhumed the mass grave, carried out the identification of the corpses, and then transported the...

The authors of the article attempt to expand the discourse on curatorial practices in the field of performing arts by introducing the notion of shared room. By making reference to their own experience in curating, they create a metaphor which serves both as a tool for describing the precarious position of curators and for designing alternative strategies of doing this work based on the ideas of solidarity, relationality and sharing. In the first part the...

This article concerns the Warsaw period in the life and work of Helena Modrzejewska. The years 1869-1876 are the least researched and described period in the entire career of this actress. The article refers to Zbigniew Raszewski’s essay ‘Modrzejewska-warszawianka’ (‘Modrzejewska the Varsavian’), debating the significance of the experience of the Krakow theatre in Modrzejewska’s work. In the light of a factual analysis, he presents the actress as a Drama Artist of Warsaw theatres, posing questions about...

The article introduces Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity and Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of becoming to research on the infamous, so-called Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, the legendary dancer and choreographer of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In this document Nijinsky describes, among others, the walks he presumably took around St. Moritz in Switzerland in 1918-1919. The text was written when Nijinsky started developing symptoms of mental illness eventually diagnosed as schizophrenia. Yet in the article Nijinsky’s...

The article describes the subversive potential of nudity and pornography in such plays as This Is a Musical by Karol Tymiński and Hundred Toasts for a Dead Artist by Anita Wach and Bojan Jablanovec, representing critical choreography focused on dominant socio-political order of representation. It also describes the deconstruction of normative models of being in the world to establish new rules of the game in opposition to existing ones and the discovery of mutual private...

The article attempts to show the work of Ingmar Bergman, in particular his 1987 quasi‑autobiography The Magic Lantern, from the perspective of the medical humanities. Following a slew of Swedish commentators, the article shows the problematic nature of reading Bergman’s text autobiographically, instead focusing on numerous representations of the body and illness. The somatic, psychic and psychosomatic insecurities of the narrator not only occupy a central place here, but they are also one of the...

This article presents the history of the acquaintance between Irena Solska and Stanisław Eliasz Radzikowski seen through the lens of their correspondence (held in the collections of the National Museum in Kraków, the Czartoryski Library). These documents not only record a relationship, but – through the personal items, intimate keepsakes, and single­‍-sentence letters enclosed in the envelopes – they are an example of an archive that transcends traditional frameworks and classifications. The author suggests using...

This article aims to analyse a sonic turn in IKEA marketing practices that can be observed since 2017. The selection of advertisements that are presented in the paper is being studied from two perspectives. Firstly, as a capitalist strategy of producing a demand for a certain product allowing to reperform acoustic harmony that is inherently connected to the notion of a home in western culture. Secondly, in quite the opposite way, as a possible aesthetic...

During a participatory project as part of the RePresentations program, there was a meeting between young people and the feminist Siksa duo. Workshopping gave rise to critical reflections on the problem of how the prevailing order was absorbing the revolution. The author has a look at the course of the project and the narrative the media has built around Siksa, describing the mechanisms for producing the image of rebels and leading to the subjugation of...

This article concerns the evasive work of the Cricot Theater, founded in Krakow in 1933. The author recalls the varied, sometimes contradictory traits attributed to Cricot, introduces the category of “games” to signify a high level of entertainment, and also describes some theater productions and statements that reflect the internal diversity of the ensemble. Among the artists appear Henryk Wiciński, Helena Wielowieyska, Józef Jarema, and Lech Piwowar – some outstanding representatives and co-creators of Cricot....

Jerzy Hoffman’s film Trędowata (1976) belongs, according to Zygmunt Kałużyński, to the history of ‘Polish psychopathology’. Jagielski, drawing on tools developed on the basis of psychoanalysis, Marxism and affective film theory, points to the repressed class antagonisms and ideological contradictions which Hoffman attempts to work through in his film. The author traces the symptoms of what is repressed in society in the work’s melodramatic excess. It is in this excess that Trędowata’s political unconscious manifests...

The article deals with speculative creative practices aimed at restoring the importance of Slavic mythology with its strongly defined matriarchal tradition. As the author understands it, these practices undertaken by Ukrainian artists are interventionist and political in nature, aiming to create a feasible utopia in the region of Central and Eastern Europe thanks to which people would be able to better cope with the contemporary challenges. While analysing the play Kreshany directed by Olena Apchel...

In this paper, the author attempts to outline the cognitive benefits of studying contemporary knowledge-creative practices of local cultures. She perceives such practices as a response to the demands formulated within decolonial studies and the new humanities to remedy the epistemic injustice typical of the Western world. Beginning with Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s concept of epistemicide and its specific relevance to the Polish cultural context, the author shows how it can be opposed within the...

In the first part of the article, the author critically refers to her book Pytanie o wspólnotę. Jerzy Grzegorzewski i Jan Klata (The question of community. Jerzy Grzegorzewski and Jan Klata). She looks at her own feminist reading of Grzegorzewski’s performances through the prism of Audre Lorde’s essay The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House and looks at the number and function of women in the institutions he managed. She also notes that...

The author begins with an observation by André Lepecki concerning the fear of working with a dramaturg. Recalling several concepts that define the role of the dramaturg in dance (Lepecki, Liesbeth Wildschut, Bojana Cvejić, Bojana Bauer, Maaike Bleeker), the author juxtaposes various interpretations of the scope and forms of collaboration with the dramaturg. She reaches the conclusion that although in a professional context, dramaturgy is most of the time associated with project-based work and the...

The article discusses the discourse and feminist practices of the transformation period in Poland. The author traces the intermingling of feminism and postmodernism at the time, the Polish specificity of modernity and democratization, pointing to the role of critical art in the performative archive of Polish feminism of the 1990s. She reconstructs the feminist archive of that time to inquire about its contemporary potential and agency. Keywords: feminism; postmodernism; feminist art; archives; public discourse

The author outlines the development horizon for virtual reality and offers a multilevel analysis of Nietota, the first Polish production using virtual reality, staged in a repertory theatre by Krzysztof Garbaczewski in collaboration with the artistic collective Dream Adoption Society. Historical and theoretical reflections are complemented by a report of the empirical studies conducted in February 2019 at the Zygmunt Hübner Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw and an analysis of the reviews of that performance. The...

The article addresses the problem of the so-called documentary turn in contemporary art, especially in those practices that are related to the project of decoloniality. It examines how traditional documentary conventions, which constitute part of the Western epistemic code, are appropriated and dismantled for the purposes of the decolonialization of the image of cultural Others. From this perspective, I analyse the main strategies used by activist artists who seek to expose the typical mechanisms of...

The article is devoted to the ban on representing living people in theatre in the 19th century. The phenomenon of copying the physiognomy, behaviour and gestures of living, recognisable people on stage caused a lot of controversy, but it also constantly aroused much interest among spectators. The article presents a number of examples of violations of the principle of ‘not touching’ living people, from the times of Bohomolec to the times of Wyspiański.  The author...