Author-curatorial tour of the exhibition, “Crystal Palace”

We invite you to a joint tour of the “Crystal Palace” with the participation of artists and curators of the exhibition. We'll start in the SIC gallery! BWA Wrocław, and then together we will go to BWA Wrocław Główny at the Main Railway Station, discovering two parts of the same story.

The starting point of the exhibition is the historic Crystal Palace, a monumental glass and cast iron pavilion built in London for the Great World Exhibition in 1851. The symbol of modernity, industrial progress and imperial ambitions becomes an excuse to talk about how we look, what remains visible and what is hidden. “The Crystal Palace” does not reconstruct the 19th century world exhibition. Rather, she is looking at what is left of her ways of looking at the world — organizing it, exhibiting it, and seeing it.

During the tour, artists (Klaudia Kasperska, Krista Israel, Patrycja Cichosz, JMB, John Moran, Aleksander Baszynski, Wiktor Dyndo, Jan Baszak, Paweł Szeibel, Tom Swoboda) will talk about their works, and the curators — Mika Drozdowska and Joanna Kobyłt — will talk about the relationships between them, the scenography and the concept of the exhibition. We will look at glass not only as a material, but also as a tool for organizing the gaze: creating boundaries, reflections and the illusion of transparency.

The very passage between the galleries will become part of the tour. Changing the place and perspective, we will see how the same themes return in two different spaces — the contemporary glass gallery and the gallery located in the historic Central Station building, only five years younger than London's Crystal Palace.

Dominika (Mika) Drozdowska — a graduate of the Faculty of Ceramics and Glass at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. She is currently the curator of the Wrocław gallery SIC! BWA Wroclaw. Her work focuses on glass and ceramics as mediums of contemporary art, but over time she has expanded it to include issues concerning not only the material itself, but also its historical, geopolitical, and social and ecological context. In particular, she is fascinated by topics such as “transparency”, “fragility” or “visibility”. Winner of the Wrocław Artistic Award 2024.

Joanna Kobyłt — curator, critic and art historian, studied art history and cultural studies and Judaism at the University of Wrocław. Member of the Polish Section of the International Association of Art Critics AICA. Winner of the Wrocław Artistic Award in the field of Visual Arts in 2023. He runs the BWA Wrocław Główny Gallery. The starting point for her curatorial work is often the historical context. He is interested in the medium of the exhibition as an ideological tool for the production of knowledge and the intersection of the history of the visual and the history of the natural sciences.

The partner of the event is the Crystal Glass Factory “Julia”.

Co-financed from the funds of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage from the Culture Promotion Fund — a state special purpose fund.