“Poznańska Szkoła Instalacji?” (The Poznan school of installation?). In W stronę miasta kreatywnego. Sztuka Poznania 1986-2010 (Towards a creative city. The art of Poznań 1986-2010), edited by Wojciech Makowiecki. Poznań: Galeria Miejska Arsenał, 2011, pp. 76-85.
Download the essay here. (In Polish with English summary.)
The article discusses the work of Poznań-based artists from the 1990s who were dubbed by unfavorable critics as the “Poznań school of installation,” while the very existence of such art trend was contested by the Poznań artistic community. The text presents an overview of the circumstances of the appearance of the term and focuses on the diversity of the oeuvre of the 1990s of students of Jan Berdyszak, Jarosław Kozłowski, Izabela Gustowska, and Antoni Mikołajczak from the Poznań School of Fine Arts (later Academy of Fine Arts). Brief descriptions of the work of five selected artists (Marcin Berdyszak, Piotr Kurka, Hanna Łuczak, Agata Michowska, and Tomasz Wilmański) are supplemented with an overview of the dominant artistic discourse of the 1990s. The author analyses the extent to which the changes on the Polish art scene following the shift of the political system in 1989, i.e. the accessibility of materials and the birth of the art market, conditioned the emergence of a more comprehensible trend of creating installations and at the same time allowed a critique of this trend.
Magdalena Moskalewicz 