Nakład Wlasny #3. Festival of Artistic Publications on Art // Chmura_online
The third edition of the research and artistic project Nakład własnydeepens the reflection on art criticism in Poland of the transformation era, focusing on the phenomena which occurred in the late 1990s and in the first decade of the 21st century.
As a result of political transformation and the fall of communist system, a peculiar boom of artistic publications and art magazines, published by both cultural institutions and independent galleries, took place after 1989. However, the reality of the free market, high costs of printing and problems with distribution proved limiting or, even, deadly for many of them. The dream of a cheap and widely available medium which would allow a direct contact with readers was quiet unexpectedly realised thanks to the technical revolution which the popularization of the Internet was.
In Poland, the beginning of the Internet era is dated to 1991, a wider access to the global Web happened at the end of the 1990s, but it was only 2005 which brought general accessibility of the Internet thanks to the development of the Neostrada system. The possibilities of the new medium were initially tested by editorial teams of magazines; the first websites appeared, along with the first internet portals, discussion forums and e-mail services. After 2006, the Net was filled with blogosphere, becoming an open forum for art critics, artists and viewers. Blogs permitted a very personal and subjective reflection while a possibility of making comments created an opportunity for polemics and discussions. Institutions began to create their own websites, one of the first of them was that of the Zamek Ujazdowski (Ujazdowski Castle) Centre for Contemporary Art. Digital counterparts of art magazines appeared in the Net. What was the advantage of internet magazines over their paper versions was the possibility of frequent publication of articles and an up-to-date commentary on current artistic life, as well as a direct dialogue with the readers.
This project is an invitation to consider the archiving and archaeology of the Web, self-publishing on the Net and the importance of the first online art criticism magazines and blogs.
TEAM
Curators: Aleksandra Grzonkowska, Anna Ratajczak-Krajka
Graphic Design: Weronika Lipniewska
Documentation: Krzysztof Chaos Olechnowicz, Florian Tuercke
Promotion: Krystyna Weiher-Sitkiewicz
Editing: Maksymilian Wroniszewski
Translation: Marzena B. Guzowska
Transcript: Piotr T. Mosur
Organiser: Fundacja Kultury Wizualnej Chmura
Financed by the City of Gdańsk
Subsidised by the National Centre for culture under the programme Kultura w sieci
