THE OPEN ARCHIVE / FINE ARTS SYMPOSIUM WROCŁAW 70

The official aim of the Symposium was “an attempt to juxtapose different ways of modern thinking about fine arts, which was supposed to lead to formation of outstanding artworks in Wroclaw’s organism”. Several artists, including the most eminent ones, were invited by dozen critics to create some new projects that were to form a new urban space for Wroclaw – a city that was still struggling with war destructions.

On March 17, 1970, the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław opened an exhibition of artistic proposals put forth by the participants of the Fine Arts Symposium „Wrocław 70”. The forms in which these proposals were displayed varied greatly; next to literary descriptions or technical notations, there appeared drawings, plans and models of diverse visual character and informational value.

In the end, only but a few of these proposals were ever realized. Moreover, a significant amount of documentation about these proposed works disappeared or was dispersed over time, haphazardly ending up in various archives and collections, both private and public. The Fine Arts Symposium can be interpreted as an attempt to materialize Jerzy Ludwinski’s concept to vitalize contemporary art practices: interacting various models of art’s function and artistic foundations, and thus creating a situation of collision and diffusion, which will lend the artistic environment greater dynamism, clarify its postulates and hasten the evolution of artistic identities as well as the tempo of artistic research. Did it really fulfill such a role? The answer to this question turns out to be rather elusive. Certainly, many myths about the event emerged soon after its less than spectacular conclusion.

It is simultaneously considered the first manifestation of conceptual art in Poland, the last gathering of the avant-garde, yet also an organizational fiasco worth forgetting. This exhibition is aimed at helping a contemporary audience form its own opinion about the outcomes of the Symposium and its place in history. Structured as an open archive, the exhibition brings together extant projects, documents, comments, movies. The content of these pages reflects the meager state in which archives on Polish art at the turn of the 1970s have been preserved.

An exhibition is the result of Curatorial Studies on Jagiellonian University in Krakow in academy year 2008/2009 in the custody of Bozena Czubak. Curators: Jolanta Gromadzka, Maja Kokot, Magdalena Kownacka, Albert Godycki.

Participants of FINE ARTS SYMPOSIUM WROCŁAW 70:
Bogusław Balicki // Jerzy Bereś // Marian Bogusz // Andrzej Bartyński // Krzysztof Coriolan //Michał Diament // Jan Dobkowski // Zygfryd Dudzik // Henryk Gała // Igor Neubauer //Roman Nyga //Jerzy Olkiewicz // Zdzisław Stanek // Anna Szpakowska-Kujawska //Jerzy Zieliński-Jurry //Włodzimierz Borowski // Jan Chwałczyk // Zbigniew Kordylewski //Zbigniew Dłubak // Andrzej Lachowicz //Natalia Lach-Lachowicz // Tadeusz Dobosz //Józef Burlewicz // Jerzy Fedorowicz // Stanisław Fijałkowski //Zbigniew Gostomski //Wanda Gołkowska // Oskar Hansen // Władysław Hasior // Konrad Jarodzki //Zdzisław Jurkiewicz // Tadeusz Kantor // Grzegorz Kowalski // Barbara Kozłowska //Zbigniew Makarewicz // Ernest Niemczyk // Jarosław Kozłowski // Edward Krasiński //Andrzej Łobodziński // Adam Marczyński // Janusz Orbitowski // Andrzej Matuszewski // Alfons Mazurkiewicz // Maria Michałowska // Ludmiła Popiel // Jerzy Rosołowicz // Kajetan Sosnowski // Henryk Stażewski // Adam Styka // Anna Szpakowska-Kujawska // Ryszard Winiarski // Bogumiła Winiarska // Anastazy B.Wiśniewski // Andrzej Wojciechowski //Krystyn Zieliński //Jan Ziemski //