Program of the Polish Exhibition of Countries and Regions at PQ 2023

8.06 Thursday
4 p.m. Look Around — Meeting with the Creators of the Polish Exhibition of Countries and Regions

9.06 Friday
11 a.m. Exercises for collective practice with Michał Sałwiński
5 p.m. Look Around: Curatorial Walk

10.06 Saturday
5 p.m. Agata Siniarska’s performance

11.06 Sunday
11 a.m. Exercises for collective practice with Zuzana Šklíbová
5 p.m. Look Around: Curatorial Walk

12.06 Monday
11 a.m. Exercises for collective practice with Petr Dlouhý
5 p.m. Look Around: Curatorial Walk

14.06 Wednesday
11 a.m. Exercises for collective practice with Katharina Joy Book
5 p.m. Look Around: Curatorial Walk

15.06 Thursday
5 p.m. Talk by Marco Stella, We Have Never Been Humans, They Have Never Been Animals: Some Thoughts on Animal Domestication and Coevolution

16.06 Friday
5 p.m. Visit to Pastvina with Sára Märc,
Let’s Meet, Work and Care for Animals

Exhibition of Countries and Regions 9 a.m.—6 p.m.*
Student Exhibition 9 a.m.—8 p.m.*
(*on Friday 16.06, exhibition opening hours are extended until 12 a.m.)

Holešovice Market (Holešovická tržnice), Bubenské nábřeží 306, 170 00 Praha 7
Link: https://www.holesovickatrznice.cz/kontakty
Venue description on the PQ website: https://pq.cz/pq-2023-info/location-of-pq-2023/

June 8, 4 p.m.
Look Around — Meeting with the Creators of the Polish Exhibition of Countries and Regions

The meeting will be focused around collective artistic practices. Ideas will be presented in the form of a collective lecture by: Zuzanna Berendt, Ludomir Franczak, Magdalena Franczak, Michał Fronk, Anna Majewska, Sára Märc, and Ida Ślęzak.

Language: English
Place: Room 1.12 in Hall no. 13, Holesovice Market
The Polish Institute in Prague is a partner of the meeting.

June 10, 5 p.m.
Agata Siniarska, performance

Agata Siniarska works in the field of extended choreography. She places her practice between how we think about the world and how we move in it. It is a place where somatics and politics intersect—a place where body perception meets social engagement— between somatic and environmental landscapes, between human and nonhuman bodies. Agata’s present research explores the idea of an Anthropocene museum, multispecies archives in the time of extinction, and various human and nonhuman alliances. For the program of the Polish pavilion at the Prague Quadrennial 2023, she will propose performative action based on her practice and inspired by artistic research conducted by the collective creating the Polish exhibition.

Duration: Approx. 30 minutes
Language: No language barrier
Place: Polish pavilion

June 9, 11, 12, 14, 11 a.m.
Exercises for collective practice with Peter Dlouhý, Katharina Joy Book, Michał Sałwiński and Zuzana Šklíbová

We are a group of Prague-based artists, curators, practitioners who decided to Look through & beyond the set of exercises designed by the Polish pavilion team and expand their proposal. Our practices derive from collective organizing, interfering with the official infrastructures and searching for ways how to cross-pollinate our artistic approaches with the knowledge of the Polish pavilion’s publication Look Around.

Together we invite you to experience four facilitated sessions, distributed over the period of PQ, and share the observations resulting from the collective practicing of some of the exercises. We will accompany these with the possibility of direct interactions, short interviews with the Polish pavilion team and exchanges.

Duration: Up to 45 minutes
Language: English
Place: Polish pavilion and its proximate surroundings

June 9, 11, 12, 14, 5 p.m.
Look Around: Curatorial Walks

The Polish exhibition Look Around is co-created by a collective of seven people: Zuzanna Berendt, Ludomir Franczak, Magdalena Franczak, Michał Fronk, Anna Majewska, Sára Märc, Ida Ślęzak. These tours offer insight into the work that is presented in the space of the exhibition, but also outside of it in thematic walks.
At the beginning of our work, there was encouragement to “look around,” which was supposed to enable us to establish an initial relationship with the place we were in. It quickly became clear that we were interested not only in “looking around” but also in “smelling around,” “feeling around,” “moving around” and “thinking around.” The movement of our bodies in the former slaughterhouse gave rise to the first directions of the project, which were developed and differentiated further in the artistic and research process. The effect of this process is the exhibition, four thematic walks and a publication.

Duration: Up to 45 minutes
Language: English (June 11 meeting additionally translated into Czech)
Place: Polish pavilion and its proximate surroundings

June 15, 5 p.m.
Marco Stella, We Have Never Been Humans, They Have Never Been Animals: Some Thoughts on Animal Domestication and Coevolution

Past decades of intellectual development in disciplines from philosophy to biology have shown, in various ways, how problematic our cultural dichotomies are, especially “nature” and “culture.” Equally, subordinated dichotomies such as “animal” and “human” show up as being highly contextual cultural categories rather than reflections of “the world out there.” They obscure our understanding of some key aspects of one of the driving forces of our history and evolution: domestication. Although traditionally conceived as the act of human dominion over nature, recent developments in the study of domestication show a more complicated image. We focus on the coevolutionary and semiotic features of domestication, understanding it as a coevolutionary process similar to others observed in nature. However, it acquired the unfortunate and sinister facets of brutal animal exploitation in European modernity, especially in the 20th century. In domestication, while not being good or bad per se, the setup of relations is what really matters.

Marco Stella, PhD, is a coordinator and worker of the Pastvina community garden and rescue farm; he studied anthropology as well as evolutionary and theoretical biology.

Duration: 45 minutes + 15 minutes of discussion
Language: English
Place: Polish pavilion and its proximate surroundings

June 16, 5 p.m.
Sára Märc, Let’s Meet, Work and Care for Animals

Out of the box and theater. We will visit a rescue farm in Prague called Pastvina. We will meet its residents, make contact with them, get to know them, and take care of them. We will become a group of farm worker volunteers and companions to both human and nonhuman animals. On our way and after work we will read texts about animal creativity, especially about those animals we meet on the farm.

Sára Märc is a research-based artist, actress and curator; part of the collective preparing the Polish pavilion.

Duration: 2 hours + travel
Language: English (+ possibility of Czech)
Meeting point: Vltavská metro station
Place: Zahrada Pastvina

Further comments:
Allergy warning: Many animals live on the farm and many plants grow
there. Wear comfortable clothes and shoes that you don’t mind getting
dirty. Take snacks with you.
Accessibility: The metro and bus are accessible to wheelchairs and
strollers. The place is located near the bus station, but a small part of
the path is an uphill forest trail.