Don’t hesitate to join us for a session with Grzegorz Jankowicz, the author of What is Art for? Conversations with Writers (part 2), which will take place on 4 July (Thursday) at 5.30 pm at the Państwomiasto café in Warsaw. It is a chance to meet the following guests: Jerzy Jarniewicz – poet, translator, literary critic, editor of ‘Literature around the World’ and Agnieszka Taborska – writer, art historian and French philologist. The session will be moderated by Łukasz Zaremba – Ph.D. student from the Department of Film and Visual Culture, Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, translator.

What is art for? And does art really have to be for anything? These are the questions that Grzegorz Jankowicz wanted to answer in his unique study. And so he asked writers whether art was pleasure only or if it served as a true tool for understanding and transforming the world. This opportunity to meet the author and his partners offers the first taste of this fascinating story about the relationship between two different domains of artistic creation.

Marek Bieńczyk talks about visual figures of melancholy, famous images of melancholics, and also about artists (from Dürer to Hopper) from the global canon of melancholy art. Jacek Dehnel reveals why he is so fascinated with photography, as seen in his book Fotoplastikon, a collection of several dozen captions to pictures from his stash. He also talks about his passion for Goya, expressed in the novel Saturn. Dark Images of Lives of Men from the Goya Family, published in 2011. Darek Foks presents the story of his co-operation with the artist Zbigniew Libera, which led to the birth of one of the most original books on the Warsaw Uprising – What does a Liason Officer Do? (TVP Kultura award). Piotr Paziński reminds us about Tadeusz Kantor’s literary and visual experiments, which influenced his own writing (the novel Boarding House, winner of the ‘Polityka’ Passport).  Piotr Sommer and Andrzej Sosnowski discuss the close ties between poetry and painting, characteristic of the so-called New York School. Thanks to Agnieszka Taborska, an extraordinary novelist and translator, we can also explore the history of surrealism, on which she is an expert (she wrote a monograph about this current in art), with special focus on the correspondence between various domains of art.

The book is the second part of the What is Art for? series. The first one, written by Tadeusz Nyczek, was published in 2012.

4 July (Thursday), 5. pm
Państwomiasto (ul. Gen. Andersa 29, Warsaw)