The culminating events of the Three Seas Art Festival 2025 are ahead of us. On May 14, we invite you to the opening of the main exhibition of the festival „Revealing what is partly sensed”.

The host and co-organizer of the exhibition is the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art in Krakow.

The title of the exhibition was taken from an essay by Danish social anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup. The author states that creativity is a process that takes place between talented individuals and the culture in which they function. In her opinion, being creative is associated not only with inventing things that did not exist before, but also with proposing a new way of understanding the reality we already know by revealing what is partly sensed. The task of the curatorial team was to indicate the connections and key issues, to capture common points in the work of artists from 14 countries who took part in the project.
The organizers invited cultural institutions from the countries belonging to the Three Seas Initiative: Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Hungary, as well as from Denmark, Turkey, Ukraine, and the Civil Society of Belarus to cooperate. Each institution selected a curator and an artistic person or collective who proposed a work on a topic of their choice from a wide range of issues related to the idea of ​​equitable development. The joint exhibition was preceded by simultaneous curatorial and artistic residencies. Some of the works were created during the artists’ stay in Krakow, while others used this time for research. The exhibition will present objects, installations, videos, and photographs created specifically for this project. In an attempt to outline common points, the curatorial team selected five concepts that can serve as signposts during the tour: habitation, natural environment, materiality, community, and technology. All works are situated at the junction of these slogans, indicating the non-obvious relationships between them. In several, the thread of Krakow appears – for some projects, the city turned out to be an important source of inspiration and a point of reference.

According to the idea of ​​the initiators – institutions creating the Three Seas Initiative Cultural Cooperation Network (3SICCN) – art is to be a way of anticipating and prototyping solutions that respond to the most important challenges of modern times. Perhaps in this context, the presented works are also a harbinger of a new order, the existence of which we only just sense.

Festival residents, curatorial and artistic teams taking part in the exhibition:

Margarethe Makovec, Wendelin Pressl (Austria)
Vera Mlechevska, Dimitar Shopov (Bulgaria)
Barbora Kundračíková, Pavla Beranová, Jiří Suchánek (Czech Republic)
Kristian Handberg, Kristoffer Ørum (Denmark)
Elli Leventaki, Morus Project – Kleopatra Tsali, Hanna Norrna, Irini Gonou (Greece)
Alexandra Tamásová, Erik Sikora (Slovakia)
Áron Fenyvesi, Rita Süveges (Hungary)
Vaiva Jucevičiūtė-Bartkevičienė, Ričardas Bartkevičius (Lithuania)
Weronika Plińska, Anna Pichura (Poland)
Călin Corneliu DAN, Ciprian Mureșan (Romania)
Kaja Kraner, Uršula Berlot Pompe (Slovenia)
Ostap Manulyak, NURT Group – Mykhaylo Barabash, Tereza Barabash, Roman Haideichuk, Yaryna Shumska (Ukraine)
Olga Mzhelskaya, Ala Savashevich (civil society of Belarus)
Melike Bayik, Gözde Ju (Turkey)

Curators of the exhibition: Kata Balázs-Miklós, Weronika Plińska, Agnieszka Sachar

The exhibition will be open until August 31, 2025.

The first stage of the Three Seas Arts Festival 2025 has come to an end, leaving behind a rich trace of creative activities and intercultural encounters.

From 9 to 24 February, as part of a simultaneous artistic residency, Krakow became a space for an intensive exchange of ideas and experiences for artists and curators from 14 countries of the Three Seas Initiative and the entire region.

Wszystkich uczestników rezydencji poznacie tutaj –  w naszym cyklu prezentacji zespołowych.

 

 

 

You can meet all the participants of the residency here – in our series of team presentations.

The residency was a time full of inspiring conversations, joint explorations, and work in places that shape Kraków’s contemporary art scene on a daily basis – galleries, studios, and artistic institutions. The participating artists had the opportunity to confront their ideas with the local environment, which was reflected in the projects they developed. The works created during the residency combine sensitivity to this year’s festival theme, each artist’s individual approach to art, and the influences resulting from meetings and new experiences.

One of the key events was the workshop „Creative Laboratories: Middle Grounds and Derivatives”, led by a curatorial-artistic team from the Czech Republic. The workshop explored various ways of defining art-based research and art created using methodologies, techniques, and technologies from different fields of contemporary science. It also provided an opportunity to evaluate the ideas developed by the international teams involved in the project.

What else awaits us as part of the Three Seas Arts Festival?
From April 25, the international design exhibition „Designed Communities – Between Reality and Vision”, inspired by Benedict Anderson’s concept of „imagined communities”, will be on display at the Podbrzezie Gallery. That same day, the „Fragile Images” exhibition will begin at the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków. On April 26, the international visual arts exhibition „Shifted Horizons” will open at the Potocki Palace Gallery linking our festival with the program of this year’s Krakow Art Week Krakers. In addition, the festival will be accompanied by the „BWA-Europa” project containing conferences, workshops and numerous events in 22 city galleries throughout Poland! However, the highlight of the festival will be the main exhibition, presenting the results of the residency teams’ work. Its opening is scheduled for May 14 at the Bunkier Sztuki – Gallery of Contemporary Art.
We warmly invite you to continue following the Three Seas Arts Festival – as you can see, many extraordinary artistic encounters still lie ahead!

The full festival program is available here.

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