Exhibitions

The exhibition accompanying the 25th anniversary of the Foundations, seeks to answer the question: how is heritage inherited?

 

 

“Moving Image” explores collecting cultural artefacts not simply as acquisition or preservation, but as a gesture toward an unknown future recipient. While it could be said that every collection – be it of visual art, of poems, or of colorful shells gathered on a shore – carries a latent promise of bestowal, this dynamic is built into the ING collection by design. In the event of the Foundation’s dissolution, its holdings would pass to the public, entering the Zachęta National Gallery of Art. In this way, the collection would become a shared legacy secured in law.

 

Interpreting this commitment with a degree of artistic license, “Moving Image” frames the collection as a medium of cultural passage, centering the exhibition on a deceptively simple question: How does one inherit heritage? The collection, even if fragmentary, gathers works of art into an ever-expanding set of images that sketch a portrait of the present, charged with the hopes, values, and beliefs that shape how contemporary culture may be received by generations to come. The exhibition, in turn, seeks to articulate this process of heritage-building not as a fixed image defined through the imposition and conservation of value, but as a moving image – one that discovers its meaning in historical contingency and cultural transience. In Moving Image, selected works from the ING collection are juxtaposed with conversant pieces on loan from artists, parallel collections, and partner institutions – placing the collection in dialogue with its wider cultural milieu while also reflecting on the meaning and limitations of ownership and institutional authority as modes of public meaning-making.

 

Here, heritage is understood not as an image to be preserved, but as an intentional act of its bestowal – an ongoing parley for renewal of the collective imaginary. It is perhaps not the images themselves, but their passage, that weaves together the agonistic fabric of society, unfolding as a dialogue between generations and shifting inscriptions of value, between cultural autonomy and social responsibility, between individual experience and the public sphere, and between continuity and the freedom of imagination.

 

Reflecting this idea, the ING Polish Art Foundation has joined forces with its sister foundation, ING for Children, to situate this act of inheritance within an educational milieu – suggesting that every act of bestowal, as it is received, is already an act of learning. After all, it is children who will inherit cultural legacies, yet at the same time they remain the least authorized, in the present, to exercise the institutional power to do so. Thus, reaching beyond its discursive frame, Moving Image unfolds materially and performatively as a form of pedagogy – one that positions the exhibition as a public space to be contested, given away, and reclaimed through a continuous series of interventions developed by Zachęta’s education team in collaboration with the School of Creativity in Vilnius.

 

Curator: Audrius Pocius

 

Organizers: Fundacja Sztuki Polskiej ING, Zachęta — Narodowa Galeria Sztuki

Partner of the exhibition: Fundacja ING Dzieciom

In cooperation with: The School of Creativity

Artists: Zuzanna Bartoszek, Alicja Bielawska, Cezary Bodzianowski, Agata Bogacka, Michał Budny, Rafał Bujnowski, Marta Deskur, Wojciech Gilewicz, Nicolas Grospierre, Grzeszykowska / Smaga, Veronika Hapchenko, Agata Ingarden, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Karolina Jabłońska, Karolina Jarzębak, Zuzana Janin, Tomasz Kręcicki, Hanna Krzysztofiak, Zbigniew Libera, Maria Loboda, Marcin Maciejowski, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Gizela Mickiewicz, Rafał Milach, Marta Niedbał i Paweł Olszczyński, Cezary Poniatowski, Joanna Piotrowska, Slavs & Tatars, Iza Tarasewicz, Andrzej Tobis, Krzysztof Zieliński.

Exhibition architecture:  Laura Kaminskaitė 

Visual identity: Jakub de Barbaro

opening: 7.11 Friday, 7:00 PM, Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, pl. Małachowskiego 3, 00-916 Warszawa.