Spoken Exhibitions are live audio dramas devoted to forgotten, overlooked or mythologised chapters in the history of Polish culture over the course of the 20th century. Here, the traditional exhibition space is renounced in favour of auditoria, conference halls, offices, warehouses and radio waves - an interactive experience of artistic phenomena
The project revolves around a curator-led tour of a oral exhibition - which centres around myths, fictions, "phantom" works and unverifiable eyewitness accounts, all related to the never-realised 20th century musical, architectural and artistic pieces.
The audio drama in three acts draws its inspiration from the artistic attempts at the "dematerialisation" of the work of art and experimental exhibition forms of the 1960s and '70s. The narrative centres non-mainstream projects, familiar only to a handful of specialists, in art, music and architecture - projects never carried out or missing documentation. Spoken Exhibitions are a textual collage divided into roles, composed of both existing and imaginary notes, manifestoes and postulates of Polish artists. The floor is given primarily to avant-garde stances, and the evoked works are always "impossible", visionary and well ahead of their time.
Spoken Exhibitions are put together by Sebastian Cichocki (curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw), Grzegorz Piątek and Jarosław Trybuś (awarded Golden Lion at the 2008 Architecture Biennale in Venice) and Michał Libera (curator, critic and music theorist). The project has been produced by the Bęc Zmiana Foundation, with the support of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Polish Cultural Institute in London.
London is the fourth stop of the project's six-city tour after Brussels, Madrid and Moscow. Later this autumn it goes on to Berlin, and Kiev.
See more on the project and its founders...
Date: 28 November 2011,
Venue: Darwin Building, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU
Organisers: Royal College of Art, Bęc Zmiana Foundation
Project cofinanced by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.
Source: Bęc Zmiana Foundation, Adam Mickiewicz Institute
See more at spokenexhibitions.pl