Announcement of Biennale Warszawa closing for visitors and change in the mode of operations

Following the Regulation of the Minister of Health dated 20 March 2020 on declaring the state of epidemic in Poland we are announcing that Biennale Warszawa will be closed for visitors until further notice. This means suspending all events for the public in our venue at Marszałkowska Street and reformatting the institution’s programme.

In view of the situation we must change both the format in which we have been functioning so far, and the mode of operations. We are forced to postpone or completely reformulate our ongoing and previously scheduled activities, having regard for their quality, joint reflection and action, and creating a community surrounding their topics as considerable factors. We want to test out the possibilities of our public presence using web-based formats. The current and scheduled exhibitions – Race and Forest and Buried Sun will have their digital extensions in the form of online files. Before we will be able to return to organising workshop and seminar meetings in our series (Economics of the future, How to talk about the climate crisis?, Plebs, common goods and alternatives to capitalism, Social School of Anti-capitalism), we will be forming working groups online with a specially designed programme. We are encouraging you to follow our event schedule on our website and social media where we will be announcing all changes, new propositions and formats of new events.

On the other hand, the pandemic is highlighting topics which we have been tackling already and which constituted the foundation of Biennale Warszawa programming: exposing crises of political, social, economic or ecological systems, and looking for their alternatives. We want to continue this debate, taking into account how significantly our perspectives change following the COVID-19 outbreak. Soon, a text by Jan J. Zygmuntowski A Decade of regeneration. How we defeated the coronavirus and the crisis of capitalism will inaugurate a new project aiming at both describing the experience of various social groups in the times of a pandemic and attempting to design the necessary change.  The ideas we develop will be translated into artistic and activist practice of Biennale Warszawa.