Seminar 1 | Poland | October 2025

The seminar commenced in the city of Wrocław with first-hand study of modernist architecture during and access to resources and colleagues focused on the intercultural history of Silesia. We visited the WuWa District and Centennial Hall in smaller groups, toured the collection of the Architecture Museum with Deputy Director Jolanta Gromadzka, and hosted a guest lecture by Prof. Deborah Ascher Barnstone (University of Sydney). 

From Wrocław our group travelled to Łódź, where we were generously hosted by the team of Dr Muzyczuk at the Muzeum Sztuki, one of the most significant institutions for international abstraction worldwide and whose own history is essential to the research questions of our project. We were able to comprehensively study the reinstallation of its permanent collection and the special exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine (co-curated by Dr Denysova) outside of public hours, which was an unparalleled opportunity to address transregionalism in post-imperial narratives of abstraction and to discuss challenges that linear chronologies pose to the realization of a “horizonal art history” of modernism. We also welcomed Dr Luiza Nader and Dr Piotr Słodkowski (Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts), who lectured on the work of Władysław Strzemiński and Henryk Streng, respectively, and these artists’ various engagement with Polish-Jewish culture and history. This focus on Polish-Jewish identity and creativity was extended beyond the avant-garde to a broader consideration of craft histories and the historiography of the Holocaust during a visit to the Central Museum of Textiles. There our group benefitted from the expertise of Marta Kowalewska (Chief Curator) and Paweł Michna (Curator), who guided us through the special exhibition Clothes in strategies of violence and survival tactics in the Łódź Ghetto and prepared a selection of folk textiles from their permanent collection for closer study.

Our final three days were spent in Kraków. At the National Museum, Acting Director Prof. Andrzej Szczerski introduced our group to a strikingly different historiography of Polish modernism than we encountered in Łódź, prompting lively discussion comparing the narratives advanced by state vs. artist-founded institutions and the shifting positions of modernism within national histories of art. This last issue was complicated further in the special exhibition Lwowianki / Women of Lviv (curated by Andrij Bojarov), which focused on women artists active in the transcultural space of Galicia. In Kraków, staff from numerous departments at the Ethnographic Museum introduced our group to their rich collections of the folk arts of Zakopane, an important site for modernist cultural renewal in Poland, and we also took the opportunity to focus on a broad range of photographic material on view at the MuFo – Museum of Photography with its Chief Curator Dr Dominik Kuryłek and at the International Cultural Centre, where we toured the exhibition Brâncuși. Sculpting with Light. At the ICC, we were hosted by the chief curator Dr Żanna Komar and our visit also coincided with the annual meeting of RIHA, which formally welcomed our group at its reception.

Over the course of the entire CAH project, each network participant will lead a two-hour Colloquium (pre-circulate a paper or prepare a lecture on their recent or current research), a two-hour Workshop (organise a visit to a collection or lead a discussion as they develop a future research topic), and serve as a Respondent (initiate the questions and response to members’ Colloquia and Workshops). During our seminar in Poland, we hosted three Colloquia and four Workshops. These events opened up broader debates about terminology, methodologies, and transregional collecting practices in the study of the region; they also focused on a range of case studies, examining the relationship between graphic design and architectural criticism in the avant-grade Hungarian periodical MA (Dr Szeredi), the resonances between modernist artistic practice and state violence in the work of Polish and Jewish-Romanian artists (Dr Kociałkowska and Dr Bar, respectively), the importance of modernist photography for rural ethnography in Hungary (Dr Secklehner), and the role of German-Czech textile arts for early critical discourses about abstraction (Dr Schmidt-Boddy).