re:primer. Chapter 1: Self-Identifications

In March, Re Gallery will be relaunched in a new guise, as re:primer – a laboratory for new practices at the intersection of the visual arts, curating, music, and other creative practices.

The project is a continuation of the Primer for City Dwellers,  developed between 2016 and 2025 in a tenement house at 7 Adama Asnyka Street in Kraków by Leona Jacewska, Martyna Nowicka, and Arkadiusz Półtorak. In its original form, the Primer was a get-together space for visual artists and musicians, a gallery, a club, and a location for artist residencies and workshops.

re:primer draws on the experiences of the Primer for City Dwellers in order to hack the museum programme, opening it up to close collaboration with new communities, and breaking down existing exhibition formats. The ground floor of the building will house a mobile recording studio, where at least once a month, music will be interspersed with conversations, group readings and performances. The upper floor will house a workshop and exhibition space, which will be used by students from institutions including the Academy of Fine Arts, the Jagiellonian University, and the University of the National Education Commission. It will become a venue for prototyping transdisciplinary curatorial practices. The starting point for re:primer will be specific works presented in the main MOCAK building and artists’ archives in the museum’s collection.

With the profile of the MOCAK programme in 2026 in mind – exhibitions by Ewa Partum, Kiki Smith, and Eleanor Antin – we will invite participants who, in various ways, bring to life the feminist heritage of twentieth-century art. . The themes of each season – Self-Identifications, Congrenations and The Last Days of Pompeii – refer respectively to the titles of works by the three artists.

Self-Identification is the title of Ewa Partum’s recognisable performance from 1980, as well as the related series of photo collages. These works explored the position of women in late communist Poland and the attitude of society at the time towards the female body. In re:primer, we will be talking to artists, researchers and critics about contemporary practices of investigating gender roles and norms. The title Self-Identifications – paraphrasing the title of Partum’s performance by using the plural form – also refers to the search for identity for re:primer itself.

The premiere broadcast of the Self-Identifications season will take place on 7 March. The programme for the event will be published soon.

Curators: Martyna Nowicka, Arkadiusz Półtorak

Martyna Nowicka – a historian, art critic, curator. She holds a PhD in humanities in the field of art studies and is a graduate of theatre studies and art history as part of the Interdepartmental Individual Studies in the Humanities and the CuratorLab program at Konstfack (Stockholm). She is interested in with issues related to 20^th-century museology, especially the development of art museums. She holds a post at the University of the National Education Commission. She headed the communications section at the Museum of Photography in Kraków, and as a critic she has published in “Gazeta Wyborcza”, “Magazyn Szum” and “Tygodnik Powszechny”, among others.

Arkadiusz Półtorak – a cultural studies scholar, curator and art critic. Assistant professor in the Department of Performative Arts at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University. President of the Polish Section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). Member of the Council of the Museum of Art in Łódź and the Jerzy Stajuda Art Criticism Award Committee. In 2020, he published a monograph devoted to institutional practices in 20^th- and 21^st-century art, entitled Konkretne abstrakcje. Taktyki i strategie afirmatywne w sztuce współczesnej (IBL PAN). He has published critical texts in publications including “Texte zur Kunst”, “Camera Austria”, “Magazyn Szum”, ”Dwutygodnik, and ”Czas Kultury”. In his role as a curator, he favours collaborates with artists who treat art as a cognitive and speculative practice.