Poland, as a leader in helping refugees from Ukraine, has a particularly rich experience in this regard. Public spaces and infrastructure are being built to meet everyday needs. Whether it is access to electricity, the ability to move or to gather – in the face of aggression by another country, the possibility of fulfilling these needs is curtailed, and the affected community must seek new solutions.

The functions of gathering spaces, transfer points, border crossings or logistics centers, dramatically expand in a situation of war. What the migrant crisis triggered by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2022 has shown is that these spaces in a crisis situation, along with the huge flow of people and goods, are able to operate on a much larger scale that is difficult to predict. We would like to examine the reflection of social processes in the changes that have taken place in the spaces of transportation, logistics, or energy transmission in the countries of our region, with a special focus on the role of Poland.

How do we prepare public spaces for crisis – from war migrations to floods to pandemics? How can we use the shared experience of countries in the region to build more crisis-resilient cities? What design solutions have worked in Poland? There have also been changes in the way institutions – museums, galleries, houses of culture – operate.

At the time of the largest influx of people from Ukraine to neighboring countries, most notably Poland, these institutions provided premises for purposes such as a day care center, temporary accommodation, language school, or meeting place. Not infrequently, the new functions have stayed with the institutions permanently, making their space and offerings more inclusive and diverse than before. Cross-border cultural exchanges on a social and institutional level that have been revived by the need to cooperate and provide support is a phenomenon we would like to explore.

Exhibition and accompanying events, June-August 2024
Gallery VI PER will present an exhibition focusing on transportation and infrastructure, understood as a tool for distributing and organizing power relations. The networks that ensure our daily functioning, such as railroads, highways, pipelines and fiber optics, play a very important role in the context of political change and changing power dynamics, as we have recently seen in the context of the war in Ukraine.

The exhibition will not only address the real meaning, fragility and vulnerability of critical infrastructure, but will also focus on reflecting on how these structures shape the physical landscape, architecture and space, as well as the collective memory of our shared history of our geopolitical region. The exhibition will focus on the theme of the Friendship (Druzhba) pipeline opened in 1964, which connects Russia to points in Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany.

Historical, geographical, economic, political, environmental, cultural, social and architectural perspectives of the pipeline in the context of the current war in Ukraine will be addressed. The exhibition will feature works by, among others, Polish and Czech artists. The gallery will host a series of accompanying events: a conversation with the artists, a film screening, and a curatorial tour. The VI PER team will also contribute to the co-creation of the issue of the quarterly magazine “autoportret”. Activities in the Czech Republic will be supported by the Polish Institute in Prague.

Research-artistic seminar and performative actions in the city space, June-October 2024
Ukrainian artists and activists working as part of the Vitsche group stationed in Germany will diversify the “Networks of Support” project with performative actions, involving the public of Berlin’s public spaces, in the summer of 2024. Intermedia, artistic displays in the urban fabric will illustrate a reflection on the challenges and difficulties of Ukrainians in cultivating and internationally promoting their own culture and identity in the face of years of Russian imperial oppression and currently ongoing wartime aggression. Artists working in Ukraine, Poland and Germany will be invited to join the project.

For Vitsche, it is the common spaces, such as streets or squares, and public buildings that are the field of artistic struggle.In 2022, at the Pilecki Institute in Berlin, the Ukrainian community organized an aid and information center in cooperation with Poles, and under the neighboring Brandenburg Gate they jointly protested against Russian aggression.The planned artistic activities will be a continuation of the cooperation that began then.The Pilecki Institute in Berlin will be involved in the activities.

Interviews with cultural workers – turn 2023/2024, autumn 2024
A team of cultural researchers in Lviv will address the topic of oral history in wartime, as an invisible but highly valuable social infrastructure for survival, culture and imagination. Interviews will be conducted with Polish and Ukrainian cultural workers and preservationists on the protection of heritage in wartime, as well as with those responsible for critical infrastructure sites that Russian troops take as prime targets for attack.

How has operating under threat affected the work of the institution? What is a wartime cultural institution – both in terms of the responsibilities and activities of the staff, as well as spaces such as exhibition halls and offices? How has the urgent need for support affected cooperation between the Polish and Ukrainian cultural sectors?

The result of the cooperation with the Center will be popular-scientific texts published in the quarterly “autoportret”, published within the framework of the “Support Networks” project in 2024, and an event in Lviv in autumn 2024, which will also present cactivities in Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany. Activities in Ukraine will be supported by the Polish Institute in Kiev.

In the summer of 2024, an issue of the quarterly “autoportret” (published by the Malopolska Institute of Culture) will be published as an integral part of the project.The issue will feature a summary of research and activities, interviews, as well as texts and visual material from the experts and artists involved.The publication will appear in Polish and English, in print and online.

phot. Peter Fabo, courtesy VI PER Gallery