Look Around * Exhibition of Countries and Regions

Credits

Collective Team: Zuzanna Berendt, Ludomir Franczak, Magdalena Franczak, Michał Fronk, Anna Majewska, Sára Märc, Ida Ślęzak

Collaboration: Petr Dlouhý, Katharina Joy Book, Michał Salwiński, Zuzana Šklíbová

Music: Marcin Dymiter, Ola Rzepka, Tokyo Drift – Pavla Bastlová

Voice: Małgorzata Biela, Anna Majewska, Sára Märc
Artistic Intervention within the Polish Pavilion at PQ 2023: Agata Siniarska

Lecture in the Polish Pavilion during PQ 2023: Marco Stella, "We Have Never Been Humans, They Have Never Been Animals: Some Thoughts on Animal Domestication and Coevolution"

Graphic Design for the Polish Pavilion: kilku.com (Idalia Smyczyńska, Robert Zając), Michał Fronk
Producer: Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute

Production:
Anna Rudek-Śmiechowska,
Krystyna Mogilnicka,
Karolina Dziełak-Żakowska

Exhibition description

The format of the Polish pavilion for the Prague Quadrennial 2023 international scenographic exhibition is reflected in the term “crossroads.” It is a meeting spot for various research and artistic paths that lead to the creation of an installation and audio walks, and a starting point for participants to explore the space extending beyond the exhibition halls. The Polish pavilion is situated at an intersection of relationships between humans and non-humans, different materialities and temporalities. All these relationships unfold in the distinct location of this year’s Quadrennial: a former slaughterhouse in the Holešovice district.

“Look around” is the phrase that started the process of getting to know this place, and was then developed through collective work. We wanted not only to look around the site of the former slaughterhouse but also to feel its smell, the texture of the walls of its buildings and its audiosphere. All these ways of experiencing the space and thinking with it have influenced the main directions of research and artistic activities we are pursuing in creating the exhibition. They concern animal-human relationships and histories, food production, multi-sensory, embodied and attentive being in a space, and the skin as a zone of contact, a surface of feeling and communication.

The pavilion will be created as an installation, expanded by sound walks that follow the paths laid out as part of the artistic and research process. The pavilion will transform throughout the exhibition and incorporate the traces left by visitors. It will be the result of processual work, while at the same time being itself a work in progress. An important aspect of this year’s exhibition is that it is being created as part of a collective process involving artists, researchers, architects, activists and curators. Decisions on the shape of all its elements – the installation located in the pavilion, the sound walks and the book – are made collectively, and the form of the various research and artistic activities carried out as part of the project emerges from a process of interaction between different sensibilities, competencies and perspectives.

Don’t we need new narratives? Another story about the world? Don’t we also need a new space for these stories? Are they no longer with us? Haven’t we been looking at it forever?