Poland rocks! (My soundtrack to the trip was by hip-hop girl band Cipedrapskuad). Click for more.

I visited the temporary space of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Above its main entrance hangs MUZEUM, an illuminated neon sign designed by artist Paulina Olowska.

The museum’s major focus is educational and popularization projects – on the production of knowledge – and thus on laying the intellectual foundations for the museum’s future activities.

This show was one of the highlights of my trip to Poland. It dealt with themes of activism and sports and has really engaged the visitors and transformed the space in a very unexpected and creative way.

This experimental project, “Square in the Pavilion”, integrates the seemingly disparate disciplines of art, architecture, design, and sport, which inform the metropolitan area’s rich and diverse street culture.

Then I visited my favorite gallery – or perhaps a group of friends, or perhaps an elusive society that shares an attitude toward art and life – Galeria Czułość. The English translation of this name is “tenderness” or the “light sensitivity of photographic paper”.

Czułość is run by artist Janek Zamoyski and focuses on contemporary photography.

We had a coffee in the best office space I have ever seen; it is a pity that the gallery has to move soon.

The Czułość Galeria located in a moody residential district in a pre-war style villa. Outside its window, an overgrown garden lends an appropriate setting for this melancholic crew.

 This beautiful work gives me ideas for ” The school of happiness” show.

Czułość hosts a lot of music events, and there is a band rehearsal space in the basement.

Later I walked to the Starter Gallery. Although the streets were covered with snow, I heard the surreal sound of an owl in this city garden, or some other bird I no longer know the name of …

On the way to lokal_30 – the gallery has moved to a new location.

Artist Kamen Stoyanov, who presented at lokal_30, is originally from Bulgaria but now lives and works in Vienna.  

It was the last fat day before Lent and these traditional Polish pączki were everywhere.

Michal introduced me to his German collector Siegfried Seewald, who is fluent in Polish.

Le Guern Gallery‘s curator Kamil Julian walked me through Tomek Baran‘s solo exhibition.

Tomek Baran is a winner of the Strabag Art Award International in Vienna, where he will be an artist-in-residence this winter.

We celebrated the day with the guys from Raster over a lavish dinner and conspired about the future of art and its distribution.

Next day we drove to Łódź , the third-largest city in Poland.

It is much grayer than Warsaw but, again, a city with a strong spirit and an amazing museum.

Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź is one of the oldest museums of modern art in the world.

The mural by Os Gemeos and Aryz in Łódź:

We had lunch with the curator of Sztucki Museum Maria Morzuch – a true and original punk and witness of the avant-garde scene in Łódź – Raster’s Klara Czerniewska, and the owner of the Tari Bari bistro, Martyna Sztaba.

Meet Martina – ex-gallerist and current owner of this stylish restaurant, which serves the best burgers in Poland.

Musician and poet Marcin Pryt from the legendary band “19 Wiosen” (19 Springs in English) joined us. Here are some of his songs:

We had cake with Marcin and Michal in a café located on Piotrkowska Street, Europe’s longest commercial street, which goes on for 5 km.

Good-bye Poland! It was fun and I will be back soon!

Finally, I am back in Vienna. In order to recover after so much traveling I drove through the Viennese woods and stopped in Kahlenberg, a panoramic spot linked to Polish-Austrian history.

The Kahlenberg Church was founded to memorialize the Battle of Vienna, which took place in 1683 after Vienna had been besieged by the Ottoman Empire for two months. The battle was won by the combined forces of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the latter being only represented by the forces of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland (the march of the Lithuanian army was delayed, as a result of which they arrived in Vienna after it was relieved). The Viennese garrison was led by Ernst Rüdiger Graf von Starhemberg, subordinate of Leopold I Habsburg, Holy Roman Emperor. The overall command was held by the commander of the Polish Crown’s forces, the King of Poland, Jan III Sobieski.

The Church is dedicated in the honor of Sobieski.

It is getting dark and I am ready to go to bed early… Tomorrow I am flying to Tirana.

More about Albanian contemporary art next week!