re:primer. Chapter 1: Self-Identification

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