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The new season at the WRO Art Center explores the relationships between technology, memory, and the contemporary media landscape. It depicts a world in instability, suspended between superstructure and disintegration, system and ruin. The program includes exhibitions, field research, archival inquiries, artist residencies, publications, and events that develop ideas leading up to the 22nd Media Art Biennale WRO 2027 Friction. (opening days: May 12-16; exhibitions run through the end of May).
The season will open with a solo exhibition by Mira Boczniowicz titled T.h.n.k.n.g Screens (September 17 – November 15). It is a labyrinthine environment of media and thought-based traces of technology, imagery, semantics, and interactions shared by humans and AI. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław.
On October 15, as part of the Namiary series, there will be a presentation of Kataržyna Jankovska’s publication Off-Grid, dedicated to alternative infrastructures, DIY culture, and forms of autonomy emerging where contemporary technological and social systems fail. By weaving together stories of protests, grassroots communication networks, technological experiments, and artistic initiatives, the book explores the possibility of independent action in a world built on fragile and interconnected infrastructures. The publication was created during a residency at V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam.
On November 20, Sonar WRO – an experimental audio platform and a project developed by the curatorial team at the WRO Art Center – will premiere. Through 22 perspectives on media art, it brings together materials from the WRO Active Archives with current perspectives from the international artistic, curatorial, and research communities, as well as cultural practitioners. These perspectives will be presented as a networked and interactive sound installation at the WRO Art Center.
The year will culminate with an open studio session featuring Thomas Garnier (December 17), who will present the results of his residency as part of the European Media Art Platform. The artist explores contemporary infrastructure landscapes and architecture in a state of limbo. In creating cartographies of ghost towns, he employs the aesthetics of ruins as elements of functioning systems. The resulting works will premiere at the 22nd WRO Media Art Biennale 2027.
These events will be accompanied throughout the season by the Little WRO Studio program – a series of workshops and educational-artistic meetings for children, parents, and friends.
WRO will also expand its activities beyond Wrocław. In September, at the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, under the theme Capital Dream, WRO will present a selection of works from the twelve editions of the Best Media Art Graduation Projects Competition.
At the end of September and the beginning of October, the superuser_do exhibition – the finale of this year’s Competition – will open for its second run in Katowice as part of the New Media Week. Superusers from WRO’s attic spaces will descend to the basements of Katowice’s BWA to once again demonstrate their artistic agency, test boundaries, and transcend established ways of working.
In Vancouver, as part of the October SCI_ART conference – which positions art as a cognitive method in the field of research on the environment, technology, and society – WRO will participate in a debate on the theme “After the Data / Cultural Climate Futures” and present the ongoing project MI – Interactive Miniatures – a collection of original programs by Paweł Janicki that take on an installation form while serving as fully fledged works of art accessible via a web browser.
In December, the interactive digital art collection Timeline, which provides access to contemporary art documentation from the WRO collection in various forms, will travel to Korea. At SeMA – Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, as part of Sonic Assembly, an exhibition dedicated to sound art, a selection of sound projects from the WRO archive will be presented.