front cover of Alina Szapocznikow
Alina Szapocznikow
Awkward Objects
Edited by Agata Jakubowska
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2011

Drawing on the work of prominent art historians, curators, critics, and collectors, this exhibition catalogue presents the most current research on the work of Alina Szapocznikow.

Born in Kalisz, Poland, in 1926, Szapocznikow studied in Prague and Paris, spent the last decade of her life in France, and created an impressive number of sculptures and drawings that are now defined as post-surrealist and proto-feminist. Recent exhibitions of the artist’s work in Germany and France, along with acquisitions by prominent collections worldwide, have bolstered Szapocznikow’s international reputation and ignited discussion of her significance to twentieth-century art.

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Andrzej Wróblewski
Recto / Verso
Edited by Eric de Chassey and Marta Dziewanska
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2014
One of Poland’s most important and independent postwar artists, Andrzej Wróblewski (1927–57) in his short life created his own highly individual, suggestive, and prolific form of abstract and figurative painting that continues to inspire artists today. This volume offers a stunning presentation and thorough re-evaluation of his work and its legacy in the international context of art history. Offering an insightful picture of the world of postwar painting in communist Europe, and highlighting Wróblewski’s political engagement, the book helps us to understand the immensely evocative vision of war and oppression that he created. This close look at a painter and a period that are of growing interest for international art historians will serve to further cement Wróblewski in the postwar pantheon.
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Art in a Disrupted World
Poland 1939–1949
Agata Pietrasik
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2020
With Art in a Disrupted World, art historian Agata Pietrasik presents a study of artistic practices that emerged in Poland during and after World War II. Pietrasik highlights examples of artworks by a number of Polish-born artists that were created in concentration camps and ghettos, in exile, and during the years of social, political, and cultural disintegration immediately following the war. She draws attention to the ethics of artistic practice as a method of fighting to preserve one’s own humanity amid even the most dehumanizing circumstances. Breaking out of entrenched historical timelines and traditional forms of narration, this book brings together drawings, paintings, architectural designs, and exhibitions, as well as literary and theatrical works created in this time period, to tell the story of Polish life in wartime.

​Employing an accessible, essayistic style, Pietrasik offers a new look at life in the ten years following the outbreak of World War II and features artists—including Marian Bogusz, Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz, and Józef Szajna—whose work has not yet found substantial audiences in the English-speaking world. Her reading of the art and artists of this period strives to capture their autonomous artistic language and poses critical questions about the ability of traditional art history writing to properly accommodate artworks created in direct response to traumatic experiences.
 
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Hope Is of a Different Color
From the Global South to the Lodz Film School
Edited by Magda Lipska and Monika Talarczyk
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2020
The history of film students from the Global South who studied in Poland during the Cold War.
 
As Poland’s second-largest city, Łódź was a hub for international students who studied in Poland from the mid-1960s to 1989. The Łódź Film School, a member of CILECT since 1955, was a favored destination, with students from Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East accounting for one-third of its international student body. Despite the school’s international reputation, the experience of its filmmakers from the Global South is little known beyond Poland. 
 
Hope Is of a Different Color addresses the history of student exchanges between the Global South and the Polish People’s Republic during the Cold War. It sheds light on the experiences and careers of a generation of young filmmakers at Łódź, many of whom went on to achieve success as artists in their home countries, and provides insight into emerging areas of research and race relations in Central and Eastern Europe. The essays reflect on these issues from multiple perspectives, considering sociology, political science, art, and film history. The book also features previously unpublished photographs and film stills from private archives along with visual and written material collected at the Łódź Film School.
 
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The House as Open Form
The Hansens' Summer Residence in Szumin: Dom jako Forma Otwarta. Szumin Hansenów
Aleksandra Kedziorek, Filip Springer, and Jan Smaga
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2014
This beautifully illustrated volume offers a photographic tour of the iconic house of Polish architect couple: Oskar Hansen, member of Team 10, and his wife, Zofia. Located in Szumin in central Poland and designed in 1968, the house serves as a spatial manifesto of Hansen’s theory of Open Form, an inspiring concept aimed at opening the architecture for its users’ participation and transforming it into a passe-partout for everyday life. An essay on the house and its conceptual underpinnings by journalist Filip Springer accompanies striking photographs by Jan Smaga, and the resulting book is both a portrait of a specific dwelling and a larger analysis of the very idea of architects’ houses and their relationship to their owners’ work.
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Maria Bartuszová
Provisional Forms
Edited by Marta Dziewanska
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2015
The work of Slovak sculptor Maria Bartuszová (1936–96) was first presented to international audiences in Kassel in 2007. Although her art has appeared in influential exhibitions and been included in prestigious contemporary art collections, up until now, she has yet to receive the widespread recognition she deserves. Dziewanska’s book offers distinct perspectives on Bartuszová’s work from renowned international critics in an effort to increase our awareness of her sculptures.

Working alone behind the Iron Curtain, Bartuszová was one of a number of female artists who not only experimented formally and embarked intuitively on new themes, but who, because they were at odds with mainstream modernist trends, remained in isolation or in a marginalized position. Revealing her dynamic treatment of plaster—a material that, from a sculptor’s point of view, is both primitive and common—the book deftly reveals how Bartuszová experimented with materials, never hesitating to treat tradition, accepted norms, and trusted techniques as simply transitory and provisional. Offering a much-needed history of a vibrant body of work, Maria Bartuszová: Provisional Forms is an important contribution to the literature on great female artists.
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MIRIAM CAHN
I AS HUMAN
Marta Dziewanska et al.
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2019
A rebel and feminist, the Switzerland-born Miriam Cahn is one of the major artists of her generation. Widely known for her drawings and paintings, she also experiments with photography, moving images, sculptures, and performance art. Cahn’s diverse body of work is disturbing and dreamlike, filled with striking human figures pulsing with an energy both passionate and violent. These pieces, along with Cahn’s reflections on artistic expression, have always responded to her contemporary moment. In the 1980s, her work addressed the feminist, peace, and environmental movements, while the work she produced in the 1990s and early 2000s contains allusions to the war in the former Yugoslavia, the conflict in the Middle East, and the September 11 terrorist attacks. Her recent production tackles ever-evolving political conflicts, engaging with the European refugee crisis and the “#metoo” movement.

Miriam Cahn: I as Human examines different facets of the artist’s prolific and troubling oeuvre, featuring contributions from art historians, critics, and philosophers including Kathleen Bühler, Paul B. Preciado, Elisabeth Lebovici, Adam Szymczyk, Natalia Sielewicz and .
 
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front cover of Object Lessons
Object Lessons
Zofia Rydet’s Sociological Record
Edited by Krzysztof Pijarski
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2017
In 1978, Zofia Rydet (1911–97) began work on a monumental project that would come to be known as her “Sociological Record”: photographing the people of Poland at their homes, she produced an extraordinary archive of around twenty thousand negatives. The images include faces, interiors, furnishings, and more. The undertaking consumed Rydet so completely that she was never able to give it final shape through a book or an art show.

Object Lessons, a new volume of essays inspired by an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, helps to dispel the myths that have formed around the project in recent years and introduces the photographer to a new global audience. The essays here contextualize and interpret “Sociological Record” from different perspectives, opening up the work to further inquiry as both an object of interpretation and a subject of theoretical interest. Rydet herself remained unresolved over the question of how to define her work, leaving the viewer to ponder whether her magnum opus is a piece of art or science. What does remain undisputed is that “Sociological Record” is a striking testimony of its time.

A fascinating celebration of Rydet’s work that is sure to spur on fresh debate about art as a social practice and a tool of knowledge, Object Lessons reminds us of photography’s incredible power to provide a visual way of thinking and a provocative method for archiving the world.
 
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front cover of Oskar Hansen - Opening Modernism
Oskar Hansen - Opening Modernism
On Open Form Architecture, Art and Didactics
M. Christine Boyer, Tomasz Fudala, Jola Gola, Aleksandra Kedziorek, Lukasz Ronduda, Felicity Scott, Karol Sienkiewicz, Mark Wasiuta, et al.
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2014
Following an international conference organized at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in 2013, Oskar Hansen—Opening Modernism analyzes diverse aspects of the architectural, theoretical, and didactical oeuvre of Oskar Hansen, who was the Polish member of Team 10, a group of architects that challenged standard views of urbanism more than fifty years ago. In chronicling the impact of Hansen’s theory of “Open Form” on architecture, urban planning, experimental film, and visual arts in postwar Poland, this volume traces the flow of architectural ideas in a Europe divided by the Cold War. Through discussions of the ideas of openness and participation in state-socialist economies, Oskar Hansen—Opening Modernism offers new insights into exhibition design and the interrelations of architecture, visual arts, and the state.
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front cover of The Other Transatlantic
The Other Transatlantic
Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America
Edited by Marta Dziewanska, Dieter Roelstraete, and Abigail Winograd
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2017
The Other Transatlantic is attuned to the brief but historically significant moment in the postwar period between 1950 and 1970 when the trajectories of the Eastern European art scenes on the one hand, and their Latin American counterparts on the other, converged in a shared enthusiasm for kinetic and op art.
As the axis connecting the established power centers of Paris, London, and New York became increasingly dominated by monolithic trends including pop, minimalism, and conceptualism—another web of ideas was being spun linking the hubs of Warsaw, Budapest, Zagreb, Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Sao Paulo. These artistic practices were dedicated to what appeared to be an entirely different set of aesthetic concerns: philosophies of art and culture dominated by notions of progress and science, the machine and engineering, construction and perception. This book presents a highly illustrated introduction to this significant transnational phenomenon in the visual arts.
 
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front cover of Past Disquiet
Past Disquiet
Artists, International Solidarity and Museums in Exile
Edited by Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2018
The International Art Exhibition for Palestine took place in Beirut in 1978 and mobilized international networks of artists in solidarity with anti-imperialist movements of the 1960s and ’70s. In that era, individual artists and artist collectives assembled collections; organized touring exhibitions, public interventions and actions; and collaborated with institutions and political movements. Their aim was to lend support and bring artistic engagement to protests against the ongoing war in Vietnam, the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and the apartheid regime in South Africa, and they were aligned in international solidarity for anti-colonial struggles. Past Disquiet brings together contributions from scholars, curators and writers who reflect on these marginalized histories and undertakings that took place in Baghdad, Beirut, Belgrade, Damascus, Paris, Rabat, Tokyo, and Warsaw. The book also offers translations of primary texts and recent interviews with some of the artists involved.
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Post-Post-Soviet?
Art, Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade
Edited by Marta Dziewanska, Ekaterina Degot, and Ilya Budratskis
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2013
By placing emerging artists in their political and social contexts, this collection attempts to confront the new activist scene that has arisen in the Russian art world during the past years. The recent explosion of protests in Russia—often with their very purpose being to decry the lack of artistic freedom—is a symptom of a fundamental change in culture heralded by Vladimir Putin’s first election. This shift was precipitated by the change to a highly commercial, isolated world, financed and informed by oligarchs. In response, the Russian contemporary art scene has faced shrinking freedom yet an even more urgent need for expression. While much of what is emerging from the Moscow art scene is too new to be completely understood, the editors of this volume seek to bring to light the important work of Russian artists today and to explicate the political environment that has given rise to such work. Post-Post-Soviet? will feature both criticism by writers and scholars, as well as dialogues with artists. Contributors include Boris Kagarlitsky, Ekaterina Degot, Keti Chukhrov, Boris Buden, Artur Zmijewski, and others.

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front cover of Team 10 East
Team 10 East
Revisionist Architecture in Real Existing Modernism
Edited by Lukasz Stanek
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2014
This volume coins the term “Team 10 East” as a conceptual tool to discuss the work of Team 10 members and fellow travelers from state-socialist countries—such as Oskar Hansen of Poland, Charles Polónyi of Hungary, and Radovan Nikšic of Yugoslavia. This new term allows the book’s contributors to approach these individuals from a comparative perspective on socialist modernism in Central and Eastern Europe and to discuss the relationship between modernism and modernization across the Iron Curtain. In so doing, Team 10 East addresses “revisionism” in state-socialist architecture and politics as well as shows how Team 10 East architects appropriated, critiqued, and developed postwar modernist architecture and functionalist urbanism both from within and beyond the confines of a Europe split by the Cold War.
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front cover of Zofia Kulik
Zofia Kulik
Methodology, My Love
Edited by Agata Jakubowska
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2019
Zofia Kulik’s rich artistic career has a dual nature. Between 1970 and 1987, she worked alongside Przemysław Kwiek as a member of the duo KwieKulik, after which she began to develop a successful individual career. While KwieKulik’s work has been well established as central to the East European neo-avant-garde art lexicon of the 1970’s and ’80s, Kulik’s solo work has yet to be examined in depth. The first publication devoted solely to her work, this monograph analyzes the themes of her rich and complex oeuvre, addressing the (post)communist condition, artistic labor, intermediality, and the conditions of working as a female artist. The book forms a portrait of Kulik as an artist whose work is both deeply focused and rich in variations that reflect the socio-political shifts in her native Poland. With contributions from leading art historians, including Edit András, Angela Dimitrakaki, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Suzana Milevska, and Tomasz Załuski.
 
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