Press conference of MOCAK, the Culture Without Barriers Foundation and the Seventh Sense Foundation

Date: 17^th November 2015, 12 noon
Venue: MOCAK audio visual room
Participants: Anna Jankowska, Ph.D. (Seventh Sense Foundation/Jagiellonian University), Karina Jarzyńska, Ph.D. (MOCAK), Zofia Kerneder-Giemborek (MOCAK), Anna Żórawska and Robert Więckowski (Culture Without Barriers Foundation)

The event will be held in Polish.

On 17^th November at 12 noon we would like to invite journalists and all those interested in unconventional education as well as in new approaches to sharing art to a press conference dedicated to working with the visually impaired.

For several years MOCAK has ran the project Touch Art addressed at blind people. The Museum's team has undergone a special training conducted by the Culture Without Barriers Foundation. Zofia Kerneder-Giemborek, a contemporary art restorer and expert in security, is engaged in the enterprise. The Museum organises workshops for the blind, integrative activities and typhlographics workshops. Currently, in co-operation with the Seventh Sense Foundation, the Museum is working on implementing the innovative project Open Art – Contemporary Art for Everyone. Its aim is to create a multimedia guidebook for smartphones and tablets, which will facilitate access to works of art for both those with a hearing or visual impairment and those without such disabilities.

Through the project we want to support the idea of visiting the Museum together in an integrative way. Contemporary works of art from the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw, National Museum in Krakow and Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow (MOCAK) will be made available in the guidebook. At the conference we will present materials documenting MOCAK's achievements to date, including results of the workshops with Robert Kuśmirowski and Rafał Bujnowski, as well as achievements of organisations that co-operate with MOCAK in the field of unconventional education.

The participants of the press conference will be:  Anna Żórawska (president of the Culture Without Barriers Foundation), Robert Więckowski (deputy president of  the Culture Without Barriers Foundation), Zofia Kerneder-Giemborek (contemporary art restorer and author of audio description for the selected works from the MOCAK Collection), Anna Jankowska, Ph.D. (president of the Seventh Sense Foundation), Karina Jarzyńska, Ph.D. (expert in education, MOCAK).

The Culture Without Barriers Foundation – its mission is making culture available to people with a hearing and visual impairment. The activities carried out by the Foundation aim to provide such conditions that would ensure comfort for people with a hearing and visual impairment while visiting a cinema, theatre, museum or art gallery, conditions that would allow unassisted and competent reception of art. The systematic and common sharing of texts on culture is also aimed as a universal appeal to undertake a dialogue about the need and possibilities of building an open-minded, socially aware society that is free from stereotype or prejudice. So far, thanks to the Foundation's activities it was possible to adjust the space of seven museums around Poland, create audio description and subtitles for several dozen films and share over 80 theatrical performances.

The Seventh Sense Foundation – was founded in 2011. It came into being thanks to the passion of people dealing with audio description both in its theoretical and practical dimension. As their motto the members of the Foundation have the saying: theory develops practice and practice develops theory. The aim of the Foundation is to raise the quality of life for people with a hearing and visual impairment, as well as to find relations between scientific experiment and practice in creating both audio description and subtitles for the deaf. The Foundation carries out projects like: Regions of Art: Audio Description – Integration – Expression, Open Art – Contemporary Art for Everyone (www.openart.ibemag.pl) or AudioMovie (www.audiomovie.pl).