re:primer. Chapter 2: Congregations

25 July – 25 October 2026

Re Gallery

Curators: Martyna Nowicka, Arkadiusz Półtorak

The title of the chaper Congregations refers to Kiki Smith’s 2014 tapestry Congregation. Like the American artist, we wish to focus not only on human communities and their practices of coming together. We will focus on how to build more-than-human communities of cells, tissues and beings – as well as how to think about these communities from a feminist perspective.

In March, the Re Gallery space launched a new iteration as re:primer – a laboratory for new practices at the intersection of visual arts, curating, music and other creative practices. The project is a continuation of The Primer for City Dwellers, initiative 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 meeting place for visual artists and musicians, a gallery and a club, as well as a venue for artist residencies and workshops.

Re-primer draws on the experiences of The Primer for City Dwellers to ‘hack’ the museum’s programme, open it up to collaboration with new communities and break down existing exhibition formats. The ground floor of the building will house a mobile recording studio, where pop-up radio broadcasts, recorded with audience participation, will take place at least once a month. Live music will be interwoven with conversations, shared reading and performative activities. A workshop and exhibition space will be created on the first floor, to be used by, amongst others, students at the Academy of Fine Arts, at the Jagiellonian University and the University of the National Education Commission. It will serve as a space for prototyping transdisciplinary curatorial practices.

The starting point for the re:primer activities will be specific works on display in MOCAK’s main building, as well as artists’ archives held in the museum’s collections. Taking into account MOCAK’s programme for 2026 – exhibitions by Ewa Partum, Kiki Smith and Eleanor Antin – we will invite people who, in various ways, bring the feminist legacy of 20^th-century art to life to co-create re:primer. The themes of each chapter– Self-Identifications, Congregations and The Last Days of Pompeii – refer to the titles of works by the three artists.

Link to Mixcloud, where you can listen to the programme: https://www.mixcloud.com/MOCAK_Krak%C3%B3w/

Access to the materials has been made possible thanks to the support of SAO Investments.

Martyna Nowicka – art historian and critic, curator. She holds a PhD in the humanities in the discipline of art studies, and is a graduate of theatre studies and art history within the Inter-Faculty Individual Studies in the Humanities programme and the CuratorLab programme at Konstfack (Stockholm). She focuses on issues related to 20^th-century museology, particularly the development of art museums. She works at the University of the National Education Commission. At the Museum of Photography in Kraków, she headed the communications department, and as a critic she has published in, among others, “Gazeta Wyborcza”, “Magazyn Szum” and “Tygodnik Powszechny”.

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.