Pascal Gielen - The Biennial and the Art Scene: a Post-Institution in the Post-Fordist Factory of Creativity

27th of May (Saturday)
2 PM Conference Room / Wyspa Institute of Art
Admission Free


Not only is there a boom in international art biennials, but they are also increasingly deployed for developing and marketing cities and regions. In order to compensate for this, political issues are more and more often put on the agenda. By means of an analysis, Pascal Gielen attempts to get a better handle on the characteristics of the art biennial as a post-museum institution with post-Fordist labor conditions. The art scene is analyzed as the new factory in which products are made and in which the ‘independent’ curator is the protagonist.

Alfredo Cramerotti - Tagging and Other Amenities of Contemporary Life

25th of May (Friday)
5 PM Conference Room / Wyspa Institute of Art
Admission Free


Alfredo Cramerotti’s lecture will introduce a series of ’tags’, each discussed on its own terms, all taking onboard the idea of how-to use various ’systems’ that govern/influence/complement/sustain our lives i.e. journalism, books, clothing, leisure, cooking and so on. Please don’t assume this would be an exhaustive list of words, as it is not. It will, however, include the following tags, among others: Footnotes, Midpoint, Leisure, Suspension, Reception, Curiosity, Knitting, Skyscraper, Access, Gap, Perspective, Hole, Dependency, Translation

Come along and discover by yourself how all these may come together and make (some) sense.

Lecture by Hito Steyerl

13th of April (Friday)
5 PM / Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk
Admission free

Wyspa Institute of Art is pleased to invite you to the Meeting Hall of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk, for the lecture of the a prominent German artist and artistic educationalist Hito Steyerl a participant in this year’s Alternativa 2012 Festival. Her lecture is the first in the series of the talks, planned within the Alternativa framework, which launches the co-operation between our Institute and the Academy. Hito Steyerl is going to show her solo exhibition at Wyspa in 2013.

Hito Steyerl will talk about her recent projects, especially "In Free Fall" about the recycling of media images and the beginning of the current financial crisis, as well as "The Kiss" a laser scanner video about an incident in the Bosnian war in 1993. How do documentary expectations shift with 3d technologies? And what does this have to do with a "withdrawal from representation"?

Hito Steyerl – a filmmaker, art educationalist and writer, based in Berlin. Steyerl started out as an essay filmmaker and successively moved into the art field. Her main interests are the digital image, it´s circulation and it´s materiality. She works a professor for New Media in the Fine Arts Department of the University of Arts Berlin. Steyerl is also the author of a book on the documentary film in art and an editor of several other films.


Her lecture and participation in the Alternativa framework are the result of the co-operation between "Wyspa" and "If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be a Part of Your Revolution" in Amsterdam, co-financed by the EU and the City of Gdańsk. The artist’s participation in Alternative is financed by IFA in Stuttgart.

Hito Steyerl’s lecture was organised in the co-operation with the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk.

The action "Being Solidary with Belarusia" in Gdańsk will comprise a series of events organised on the premises of the University of Gdańsk and the Wyspa Art Institute.  The event in then Three-City agglomeration will launch the series of events all over Poland which will finish with a big open-air concert in Warsaw on 22 April 2012.


24 March (Saturday) Wyspa Institute of Art, conference room
18:00 A show of documentary films:

"Białoruś. Droga do niepodległości"/ Belarus. A Road to Independence (Dir. Mikołaj Wawrzeniuk). The film shows, inter alia, the history of the Belarusian People’s Republic (BNR). There will be a concert on the anniversary of the incorporation of the Republic on 25 March entitled "Solidarni z Białorusi¹" ("Being Solidary with Belarus").

"Muzyka wolności" / Music of Freedom (Dir. Jerzy Kalina)
A document about an annual Belarusian rock music festival "Basowishtcha" which takes place in the Podlasie region of Poland.

"Dosyć! Do wolności" (bel. Dawoli, Da Woli!") / Enough! Towards Freedom! Belsat, 2011

A summarising discussion:
Guests: Franak Wiaczorka, Helena Głogoka - the chairperson of the "Chatka" Belarusian Cultural Society, Maciej Konopacki - a journalist, a son of one of the characters in the film " Belarus. A road to Independence" Hasan Konopacki.

The event will finish with the film "Massacre" (Dir. Andriej Kudinenko), 2010

A crazy and "ironical" horror, being an adaptation of Prospero Mérimée’s short story Lokis. The action takes place on Belarusian terrain incorporated into the Russian Empire in the mid 19th century. It tells about a young aristocrat who changes into a bear during the night. He is also the figure of an exemplary Belarusian patriot who refuses to declare himself either as a Pole or Russian.

25 March (Sunday) 18.00
Amaroka, Vinsent, Botanic Project | Buffet Club, admission free
A concert of committed Belarusian groups during which photographs from Belarus of 2010-2011 with be projected along with the Polish commentary by Vinsent.

The organiser - Stowarzyszenie Wolna Białoruś/ Free Belarus Association, The "Mozaika" Student Scientific Circle, Wyspa Art Institute, the "Alternator" Academic Cultural Centre of Gdañsk University and the "Belsat" television

20th of January (Friday)
05:30 PM / our book-store Bookyard, Wyspa Art Institute
The meeting will take Krzysztof Miękus
Free entrance

„7 Rooms” is Rafał Milach’s most personal project. He went to Russia to meet his relatives, living in east Siberia. He had to go through three cities on his way: Moscow, Ekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk. It was there, where he met the majority of the characters of his book „7 Rooms”. They invited him to their homes, showing how they lived. He would return to them regularly for 6 years, trying to keep the relation as close as possible. He lived with them, travelled with them and spent some time at their "dacha" (summer house in the country).

Elżbieta Matynia is associate professor of sociology and politics at the New School for Social Research, New York. She graduated in Polish studies and sociology from the University of Warsaw. In Poland she is currently associated with the University of Lower Silesia. Founder and director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, she has undertaken many research and educational projects in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa. She has authored numerous articles and works about contemporary democratic culture, including the book Performative Democracy, published in America by Paradigm in the prestigious series Yale Cultural Sociology, and whose Polish edition will be presented at this year’s Alternativa.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan
30th June, 2011
performance, radio-play

Abu Hamdan will develop both an audio essay and a collective listening performance/presentation event using the reanimation of the shipyard radio, Radio Alternativa, as both a conceptual point of departure and a means of broadcast and distribution of the work. Lawrence Abu Hamdan will intersect his current research into the politics of listening and the role of the voice in law with an exploration of the radiophonic history of the Gdańsk Shipyard to produce a new work that sonically inhabits the audio infrastructure at the core of its investigation.

Abu Hamdan is sound artist and researcher based in London. He is currently undertaking a PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Karem Ibrahim i Linda Pollack
25th June 2011
Wyspa Institute of Art & Hall 90B

What if democracy is not an exceptional singular case, specific to one country, but a series of instances, moments and locations... A pluralism of histories and exchanges that can be found in times recent and past; Cairo, Tunis, Madison Wisconsin, Gdansk Poland, Paris, the Congo, Philadelphia... Karem Ibrahim and Linda Pollack will collect slogans, chants, and manifestos from democratic movements around the world via a Facebook Page (Everything is Exceptional). For the Alternativa Festival, they will create the Everything Is Exceptional Gathering Point – a recording booth / meeting place, inviting the public to recite the collected texts, both in original language (with the help of pronunciation coaching) and in translated languages.

Wyspa Institute of Art
17th June 2011, 7 pm
book launch / screening with editor/ curator Ana Janevski
(Warsaw, MoMA)


Alternativa invites you to the promotional meeting of our latest book As Soon as I Open My Eyes I See a Film. Experiment in the Art of Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by the first exhibition organized by the MoMA Warsaw.
It’s a journey to a country which has ceased to exist, but which gave rise to the most important art myth
in our part of Europe – the myth of radical art. The presentation of the book is accompanied by the screening of short
amateur films from Yugoslav cineclubs and the examples of Yugoslav ‘Black Wave Cinema’. The program entitled We cannot promise to do more than experiment includes films by Dušan Makavejev, Karpo
Godina, Želimir Žilnik, Sanja Iveković.