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Friction. situates the 22nd Media Art Biennale WRO 2027 within the field of complex contemporary emergences, their entanglements, and tensions.

Friction. becomes here a method for seeking meaning and alternative modalities of action; a practice that stands in opposition to the dominant logics of fluidity, speed, and ease, to the pressure of smooth systems and interfaces designed to remain invisible. Friction. as a counterpoint to the technocapitalist ideal of the seamless, as an imperative of sensing, as a practice of consciously remaining within uncertainty.

With the notion of Friction., we attempt to grasp what this edition of the Biennale seeks to be. It is that which takes place in-between – within a space of mutual interaction, open to discomfort, uncertainty, and the tension between notions, visions, and concepts. It is precisely where the boundaries of the available field become visible that friction emerges.

Friction. is a way of moving beyond the limits of default settings and the flattenings of perception they produce, directing towards more open forms of distributing meaning and attention.

In the process of curatorial research, we will map contemporary fields of tension and investigate phenomena that artists diagnose, test, bring together, and work through speculatively. Via processes of specification and contextualization, we turn towards shadowed territories, towards practices that are particular, situated, and often unappealing from the perspective of dominant regimes of visibility. We are interested in the imperfect, the ambiguous, the uncertain, and the marginal; in alternative infrastructures, unoptimized systems, practices of slowness, and less extractivist configurations of relations with technology, the environment, and one another.

The semantic scope of Friction. will unfold through successive iterations. New words will appear after the dot, forming combinations that allow the concept to be contextualized, expanded, transformed, extrapolated, or focused on a particular detail.

Friction. is an ephemeral configuration of meanings, an act of reaching outward – a ground for individual critical inquiry.

Dominika Kluszczyk + Klio Krajewska