On the 15th of April 2025, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute announced the Polish agenda of cultural activities at the EXPO Osaka World Exhibition, as well as the schedule of accompanying events. In order to bring home the specifics of the peculiar formula of a national pavilion at an exhibition presented in the context of an entirely different culture, the press conference itself became an opportunity for an experiment in which the planned agenda was carried out live. Instead of a list of events – a concert, instead of questions from the audience a direct meeting with the realisers, curators, artists and creators who will and represent Polish culture in Japan. Emergent from this meeting was the fundamental question of the possibilities, opportunities and risks of cultural translation – a question to which individual events often bring unexpected answers.
Małe Instrumenty, photo: Łukasz Rajchert / press materials
The conference opened with a concert of Small Instruments – a project by Paweł Romańczuk, an interdisciplinary artist who creates his own instruments with which he has been hacking the system of classical music for years: its aesthetics as well as the notion of expertise/professionalism. Scheduled to take place in October, the concert agenda at Osaka's Namba Square will present not only Romańczuk’s work, but also works by Kinga Głyk, Klawo and Mitch & Mitch. The Polish musicians will demonstrate what is currently most interesting in Polish jazz and alternative music, but will also draw from the Japanese context: the unparalleled local popularity of Chopin (whose works Romańczuk will play on a toy piano), as well as traditional arts whose aesthetics and principles closely correspond to Romańczuk's practice.
Joanna Hawrot, 'Wereable Art – Unseen Threads', Daimaru Shinsaibashi, Osaka, 31 May – 24 June, photo: Zuza Krajewska
The further part of the meeting - and the next item on the Polish agenda at the EXPO – was a performative performance by the artist and dancer Bożna Wydrowska, who referred in her performance to the issues of corporeality and otherness. These themes are also taken up in the exhibition Joanna Hawrot: Wearable Art – Unseen Threads presented throughout May and June at Osaka's Daimaru Shinsaibashi department store. Hawrot, fashion designer and author of the yukata in which Wydrowska was dressed during the performance, invited twelve women – both Polish and Japanese – to share their stories with her. Based on these stories, the artist designed unique costumes, referring to the Japanese court fashion in vogue during the Heian period. As the co-curator of the show – Paweł Pachciarek – emphasised: the exhibition’s aim is to empower voices that have so far scarcely or never been heard in the world of fashion: transgender, older or otherwise marginalised women, and to express their stories through textiles – a form that is itself interwoven, through its centuries-long association with women's activities, also tells a multithreaded, complex story of the work of women artists, sometimes marginalised from the history of art and culture.
Illustration by Magdalena Burdzyńska from the exhibition 'The Amazing Land of Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi', 3–23 October, Knowledge Capital in Osaka, photo: Magdalena Burdzyńska for IAM
The exhibition prepared at the Adam Mickiewicz Institute also presented other activities foreseen as part of the Polish programme. One of them is the exhibition The Amazing Land of Quarks, Elephants and Pierogi scheduled for October 2025, created in collaboration between IAM and the Knowledge Capital association. The presentation revolves around the book by Mikołaj Gliński, Matthew Davis and Adam Żuławski, in which the authors present Poland to readers through a hundred words such as: Miłość (Love), Nauka (Science), Wolność (Freedom), but also Ziemniak (Potato), Witamina (Vitamin) or Jęzor (Tongue). However, the scope of the exhibition also extends beyond Poland as such - for it also addresses the larger topics of modern language education, building cultural bridges and the role of literature in shaping relationships. In 2021, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute published a Japanese translation of the book – Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi: Poland in 100 Words (素粒子、象とピエロギと−101語のポーランド) – translated by Yasuko Shibata. Just as worthy of our interest is the comprehensive graphic design prepared by Magdalena Burdzyńska – not limited to the composition of the book, but wholly encompassing the entirety of the visual identification for the event. In it, Burdzyńska draws on both Polish and Japanese traditions, creatively combining elements and showing the unobvious connections as well as visual tropes between these two red-and-white cultures.
Covers of the book 'Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi: Poland in 101 Words' in Japanese – 素粒子、象とピエロギと−101語のポーランド, translation: Yasuko Shibata, text: Mikołaj Gliński, Matthew Davies, Adam Żuławski, editor: Adam Żuławski, illustrations and book design: Magdalena Burdzyńska, publisher: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2021, photo: Grażyna Makara/culture.pl
In turn, as part of the Chopin Week, referring to this year's Competition, Dagmara Furgał's film Japanese Kujawiak – will be premiered, a documentary about a Japanese couple fascinated with Polish folklore. The protagonists of the film, who run a school of Polish folk dance and a museum of Polish folk art, demonstrate not only the contagious power of passion, but more importantly the power of intercultural connections, mutual inspirations or correspondence, which are able to bring cultures that are distant geographically or even separate in terms of their values and beliefs closer to each other.
A figure who has been successfully crossing similar barriers between Poland and Japan for decades turns out to be Maria Skłodowska – Curie, who, like Fryderyk Chopin, is treated in Japan with special respect. The aim of the exhibition Yuriko Sasaoka: Polonia x Skłodowska - Curie's Magic Lab - The Power of Migration is to show the Nobel Prize winner in a different light - not only as a brilliant scientist, but also as a migrant, feminist pioneer and social activist. In Sasaoka's installation Skłodowska's work becomes an representation of ideas flowing across national borders, a flux of thoughts and experiences that can hardly be encapsulated in a single biography.
Yuriko Sasaoka, 'Polonia x Skłodowska-Curie’s Magic Lab – The Power of Migration', 4 June – 5 July 2025, Osaka City Central Public Hall, photo: S C Felix Wong
The Polish cultural agenda, however, does not focus only on the past or tradition, but also leans into the future, examining how the present moment can become a platform for designing our common perspectives. Such is the role played by Nohara no ue de - an exhibition by young Polish painters Edyta Hul and Róża Litwa, who presented their works in the space of the Sōjiji railway station in Ibaraki, and later also in the building of the local Community Centre in the same city, where they met it with Japanese artists Chie Matsui and Nana Kuromiya.
Róża Litwa, 'Untitled', 2024, oil on paper, photo courtesy of the artist. Edyta Hul, 'Untitled', 2024, photo courtesy of the artist.
The very title of the exhibition – In the Meadow – suggests the need to take contemporary art beyond the context of the white cubicle of a gallery or museum and let it into the spaces of everyday life, buzzing with liveliness and vitality. In this way, the works of female artists have the chance contribute and change the places in which they find themselves, and at the same time, in keeping with the spirit of the exhibition, allow other forms of community to grow, which art renders visible.
Sinfonia Varsovia, photo: Bartek Barczyk
The main agenda will also be accompanied by complementary events. One of them is Sinfonia Varsovia's October tour stretching from Tokyo to Nagoya, during which Martha Argerich, Ivo Pogorelić, Aimi Kobayashi and Kyohei Sorita will perform alongside the Warsaw musicians – with Christian Herming as the conductor. In temporal proximity to the timeframe of the Chopin Competition in Japan, we will have the opportunity to hear not only works by the Polish composer, but also by Beethoven, Mozart or Dvořak. During the conference, the trio of musicians – violin, viola and cello – played selected compositions.
This review concludes with an exhibition by acclaimed Polish – Japanese artist Koji Kamoji Let Not Superfluous Things Overshadow The Whole at Tokyo's Watari-Um Museum of Contemporary Art, the first domestic retrospective of the artist who has lived and worked in Poland for over sixty years. Curated by Maria Brewińska, the show comprehensively presents the work of Kamoji, who consistently explores subjects such as passing, forgetting, death, but also reconciliation and sustainability. The artist's installations, inextricably linked to the location-specific contex, are a fascinating documentation the experience and perspective of the artist, whose sensibility is invariably influenced by Japanese aesthetic and metaphysical concepts, as well as his strong attachment to Poland as the country he chose to be his home.
Koji Kamoji, 'Still Life', 2003/2013, installation, photo: Hans-Wulf Kunze
Adam Mickiewicz Institute's full cultural agenda accompanying the World Exhibition EXPO 2025:
• 30 March - 27 September: exhibition 'SOU #15 Nohara no ue de – On the Field', JR Station Soujiji, Ibaraki
• 8 April - 22 June: Koji Kamojie's exhibition, 'So that superfluous things do not overshadow the whole', Watari WATARI Museum of Contemporary Art We
• 31 May - 24 June: exhibition 'Joanna Hawrot: Wearable Art – Unseen Threads', Daimaru Shinsaibashi, Osaka
• 14 June - 5 July 2025: exhibition 'Yuriko Sasaoki: Polonia x Skłodowska – Curie's Magic Lab – The Power of Migration', Osaka City Central Public Hall E
• 28 June - 13 July: 'SOU #15 Nohara no ue de – On the Field' exhibition, Fukushi Bunka Kaikan, Ibaraki
• 28 August: premiere of the film 'Japanese Kujawiak', directed by Dagmara Furgał
• 3-23 October: exhibition 'The Amazing Land of Quarks, Elephants and Pierogi', Knowledge Capital, Osaka
• 4-5 October: 'Sound Culture. Poland x Japan Music Festival', Namba Square, Osaka
• 4-12 October: Sinfonia Varsovia tour in Japan
