Center for Contemporary Art Poland

• Artist first  

  • We emphasise direct cooperation between the visiting artist and the institution. The residency follows the practice, ideas and methods of an individual (or collective) rather than programming. However, our residents work and research in co-operation with curators, project coordinators, PR & press department and have access to U–jazdowski’s production facilities and resources.

• Researching is testing  

  • We support experiments allowing our residents to initiate and test their project propositions. We believe in artistic practices that can lead to unexpected outcomes and respond to the changing world. We consider that the time to understand, connect, get inspired and change one’s mind is as valuable as making an exhibition. We offer time and space, not deadlines. 

• Presenting is not always exhibiting

  • We understand residencies as a medium for artistic practice that allows for searching for models of presentation other than exhibitions. This includes many different types of outcome including performance shows, lectures, seminars, community-engaging projects, but also less formal situations such as colloquia, dinners and conversations.

• Mapping Warsaw and involving its residents

  • Our residents’ works are frequently deeply entrenched in the local context of Warsaw. They map and enter into a dialogue with the city on many layers, involving its inhabitants in the process of creation and allowing different forms of knowledge to surface.

• Polylogue and knowledge exchange

  • We believe that learning and artistic experimentation benefit from artists’ mobility, institutional collaboration and open-ended processes.

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• Since 2002, we have continually developed and re-defined our residency programme, sustaining an up-to-date critical reflection on the capacities of residencies as an artistic and instituting practice. We have used our long-standing experience to implement courageous programmes responding to ever-changing relations between creators, organisations and social environment. In the frame of these programmes, the participating artists and curators are able to research and experiment in selected fields.
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• Art residencies at U–jazdowski offer interdisciplinary stays lasting several months, which combine art and research within a theme determined individually by each invited artist and curator. Collaboration with the artists-in-residence is based on two thematic lines that span several years of the programme.
• Hospitality has been one of our thematic lines since 2018. Within this topic, residencies and curatorial research focus on informal and caring relationships both in the institutional context of art, as well as in various social environments.
• Since 2015, we have been looking at performance as one of the responses to our Vanishing Points theme. We are interested in artistic practices in which the primacy of an object as the work of art is abandoned in favour of process, use of intermedia, and ephemerality.
• Participation in the residency programmes is by invitation only. Artists are invited by the U–jazdowski curators or selected on the basis of recommendations from our partner institutions.
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• Re–Directing: East is a month-long residency as well as a research seminar for six curators. The participants exchange experiences and knowledge, take part in an extensive programme of study visits, and conduct curatorial research within the proposed themes, including Hospitality and Establishment of Creative Communities.
• The notion of "re–directing" refers to the need to facilitate collaboration in-between art initiatives that, due to geopolitical conditions, did not have many opportunities to cooperate. Therefore, it has a global dimension, and is not geographically limited.
• The programme Re–Directing: East has been run since 2013; the open call for proposals is announced through the U–jazdowski website and social media.

https://u-jazdowski.pl/en/programme/residencies/open-calls

Connections

• We work with independent curators, art institutions, galleries, as well as other institutional partners such as schools, NGOs and research institutes at both national and international level. We are member of international residency networks: Res Artis and ACCR.

• Current partners who finance and co-organize the residencies at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art: 

• City of Warsaw