Centre for Contemporary Art 'Wawel Castle'

Artists: Michał Gayer, Justyna Gryglewicz, Michał Hyjek, Szymon Kobylarz, Magdalena Lazar, Cecylia Malik, Mateusz Okoński, Agnieszka Piksa, Aneta Rostkowska, Marta Sala, Łukasz Skąpski, Piotr Sikora, Kuba Skoczek, Łukasz Surowiec, Piotr Swiatoniowski, Wojciech Szymański, Kuba Woynarowski.

Centre for Contemporary Art “Wawel Castle” is a fictive centre for contemporary art in Cracow/Poland. It is “located” in an existing museum of Wawel Royal Castle. The Museum almost never allows any contemporary art into its spaces so we decided to create an imaginary “collection” of site-specific works of art situated there. The artists taking part in our project don't create any physical works, instead they reappropriate different elements of the Castle and its real collection and claim authorship over them. They create stories and new meanings related to these objects.

After a successful first edition of the project that consisted in a guided tour around the Castle, this year we invited a performer Olof Olsson to prepare a special performance that will take place inside the Castle. During the event the objects from the Museum’s collection will be presented as contemporary artworks. We also intend to create a second - this time international – full edition with different artists. It will take place in 2015 and consist in site-specific artworks, a guided tour around them lead by us and the artists and a special map of the Castle with all the artworks marked and described. Currently we are also working on a website that will look like a website of a normal art institution and present all artworks from our “collection”.

Our project is an attempt to break the barrier related to the physical and symbolic inaccessibility of the Wawel Castle, to rediscover the potential hidden in this most recognizable element of Cracow’s urban fabric and to provide a stepping stone to a critical and imaginative reinterpretation of the issues related to the history and tradition of the city. Together with invited artists we intend to liberate narrations “imprisoned” there and use them to construct a living, developing hypertext that would allow a new way of sensing and experiencing the Castle. By means of the project we would also like to test the power of language in creating a different and compelling “reality” and in providing an untypical agency to an invisible art institution.

This project is an example of a new vision of curating we created, which combines the gonzo “style” with the reality of the economic crisis (so-called “gonzo curating”).

An important aspect of the project is the narrative as such – it seems that after the postmodern deconstruction of language a new need for narrative and storytelling is emerging. It is particularly visible in the growing popularity of ambitious TV-series, but also in the emergence of whole group of neo-conceptual artists and curators that very intensively work with language.

The project doesn’t acknowledge a rigid opposition between fiction and the real. Instead it proposes to look at fictions as a possessing specific "reality effects" – as influencing the real world in various ways. In this respect one of the main inspirations for the show was Orson Welles’ masterpiece – a radio drama The War of the Worlds (1938) that caused a real panic and hysteria among wider audiences in the United States. Another reference is the pivotal Happsoc piece of Stano Filko and Alex Mlynárčik (1965), in which the artists designated all life in the city of Bratislava as a work of art for one week.

Aneta Rostkowska, Kuba Woynarowski