What's new at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in 2026? – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

• In 2026, the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art continues its programme grounded in the bold reflection that contemporary times demand—towards artistic and cultural practices as well as towards the social condition. The Centre’s activities focus on today’s challenges, crises, and tensions, as well as on the search for new artistic languages capable of describing and critically examining them.
  • Among the new group exhibitions are: This Cat Was Drawn During the War, Not water, not earth, A Constitution for the Earth and Bodies Beyond the Law. Towards More-Than-Human Justice, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Crimea. Alongside them, individual presentations by artists such as Róża Litwa, Anna Baumgart, and—as part of the MSK cycle—Piotr Bosacki, Karolina Breguła, and Aneta Grzeszykowska are planned.
• The well‑received series {Live}—weekly Wednesday meetings with artists offering space for direct, informal conversations about art, creative processes, and the everyday dimension of artistic work—will continue throughout the year.
  • In the autumn, visitors will once again be able to attend the next and final edition of the Rozdroże Festival. Meanwhile, the year‑round film programme will include premieres of new works representing the most compelling phenomena in contemporary artistic cinematography and its peripheries, as well as film cycles accompanying exhibitions and produced in collaboration with the curatorial team. The music programme, developed around sound installations closely connected to the Castle and its surroundings, will take place in three cycles: spring, summer, and autumn.
• The audience may also look forward to the next—already the thirteenth—edition of the {Project Room} series, offering young Polish artists the opportunity for their institutional debut. As every year, the U–jazdowski programme will be enriched by artistic residencies, providing creators with time, space, and conditions to work on projects often deeply rooted in current social contexts. Publications, guided tours, and workshops—expanding on themes explored in the exhibition programme—will complement the season.

Selected exhibitions and events at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in 2026

• This Cat Was Drawn During the War

  • group exhibition
  • curators: Anna Łazar and Lada Nakonechna
  • public programme curator: Katia Yakovlenko
  • 20/03/2026 – 13/09/2026
• Artists expose the mechanisms of visual politics even in the face of war, conflict, violence, and social crises. When encountering works of art, it is worth asking questions about their messages, visual rhetorical tools, and sources of formal strategies. The title, This Cat Was Drawn During the War, is only seemingly straightforward.
  • First: This is not a cat (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”), yet it invokes the dopamine released when viewing images of cats. Second: the exhibition will primarily feature installations and video works. Third: it examines how to direct one’s actions and agency in times of total crisis.
• The exhibition also explores how art functions during war and whether there is room for more demanding aesthetics. It examines the weaponisation of art and culture, and reflects on the long‑lasting imagery of World War II, the wars following the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the war closest to us geographically—the Russian aggression against Ukraine.
•  

• Not water, not earth

  • group exhibition 

  • curators: Anna Czaban and Krzysztof Gutfrański

  • April–September 2026
• The exhibition investigates borderland landscapes—geographical, political, and symbolic—and their ability to preserve traces of violence, memory, and imaginings of nature. It emerges from the wetlands of the Polish‑Belarusian border but also from the tension between life and decay, memory and forgetting, viewed through the prism of vivianite—a mineral that forms a hypnotic blue‑green shade on bones and wet wood.
  • This “blue from the bog” becomes the exhibition’s guiding light: a pigment of history and a filter through which border politics, migration routes, and fantasies of “pure nature” are read. Artists treat the swamp as an anaerobic laboratory—a space that halts decay, preserves violence and dreams, and destabilises fixed categories of the human, the rational, and the national. In this crumbling geology of official narratives, vivianite acts as a subversive marker.

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Crimea — group exhibition

  • Curators: Oksana Dovgopolova, Kateryna Semenyuk, Alim Aliev
  • 20/03—28/06/2026
• The multidisciplinary curatorial duo, together with a Ukrainian human‑rights activist and journalist (Deputy Director General of the Ukrainian Institute), brings together works by Ukrainian artists from different generations. Their aim is to shape an understanding of the forces that define the contemporary discourse on Crimea and its role within the European system of artistic and civilizational values.

• A Constitution for the Earth and Bodies Beyond the Law. Towards More‑Than‑Human Justice

  • group exhibition and public programme

  • curators: Małgorzata Kaźmierczak, Arkadiusz Półtorak

  • November 2026—March 2027
• Can ecosystems possess rights? The exhibition addresses this question through examples from Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, India, Bangladesh, New Zealand, and Spain, where rivers, mountains, or Mother Earth have been granted legal personhood. Such decisions—like granting legal status to all rivers in Bangladesh in 2024 or including Pachamama in Ecuador’s constitution—serve as tools against environmental degradation and as a means of transitional justice after periods of systemic political violence.
  • The exhibition examines how art can contribute to redefining contemporary concepts of social justice by exposing the complex relationships between humans and nature and highlighting the need for more‑than‑human justice. It also reflects on the post‑communist transformation in Poland and the Eastern Bloc as a missed opportunity for environmental justice.

• Róża Litwa

  • solo exhibition

  • curator: Ewa Gorządek

  • artist: Róża Litwa
  • October 2026—February 2027
• A solo exhibition of Róża Litwa, a painter, draughtswoman, and visual artist. The central theme of her work is the human figure. Through repetition and multiplication, she creates narratives using simplified human forms devoid of individualising traits. These figures act as modules in compositions resembling unusual ornaments. Litwa points not to society but to the crowd—gatherings of programmed units. She merges painting and sculpture to create subtle yet coherent stories about humanity, seen from a posthumanist perspective.

• Anna Baumgart

  • solo exhibition

  • curator: Michał Jachuła

  • October 2026—February 2027

• Anna Baumgart focuses on water as an evolutionary, cultural, and climatic factor, inspired by Elaine Morgan’s aquatic ape hypothesis. She explores models of human adaptability, liminality, and interdependence within the environment, continuing the reflection on the intersections of contemporary science and visual art.
  • Baumgart is a post‑conceptual artist, director, and set designer. Doctor of Fine Arts. She has been awarded multiple scholarships from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Her film, performative, and sculptural works have been presented at numerous exhibitions, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Jewish Museum in New York; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin; KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin; Museum on the Seam in Jerusalem; Casino Luxembourg in Luxembourg; CCA in Moscow, Riga, and Tallinn; the Zachęta National Gallery of Art and the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw; the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw; and the National Museum in Warsaw. Her works have also been shown at video and documentary art festivals, including Videobrasil in São Paulo, Videonale in Bonn, Monstrainvideo in Milan, the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück, New Horizons, and Watch Docs.

    Her project Sun Conquerors (2012) was invited to Manifesta 10, but due to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine she declined the invitation as an act of protest. The film Fresh Cherries (2010) received the Audience Award for Best Video at the Loop Festival in Barcelona.

    Her works are held in numerous Polish and international collections, including Hauser & Wirth, FRAC Poitou‑Charentes, the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, the Upper Silesian Museum in Bytom, the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the National Museum in Warsaw, NOMUS New Art Museum in Gdańsk, and the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok.

    From 2000 to 2006 she ran the Baumgart Café at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, an artistic‑activist project that became a cult venue on the Warsaw cultural map of that time.

• {Project Room} 2025/2026

  • cycle of exhibitions by emerging artists

  • curator: Krystyna Różańska‑Gorgolewska

  • January—December 2026

• In its thirteenth edition, artists and collectives submitted exhibition proposals through an open call. The cycle enables emerging artists to debut at the Ujazdowski Castle, receive funding for project realisation, and benefit from curatorial, production, and promotional support. From nearly 800 submissions, six presentations were selected. The first opens in December 2025, with the remaining five in 2026.
  • The artists presented will be: Mateusz Hadaś & Marcin Pietrucin, Apolonia Bokszycka, Anna Grzymała, Piotrek Kowalski, Aleksandra Przybysz, and Piotr Stechura.

• {Live}

  • public meetings with artists

  • concept: Anna Łazar

  • programme: U–jazdowski Curatorial Board

  • January—December 2026 and onwards

• The {Live} series continues the weekly meetings launched in 2025, offering direct conversations about art, technique, and current creative practices. The open format encourages participation from both professionals and newcomers interested in a relaxed atmosphere. Guests include artists at various career stages, whose work significantly influences contemporary discourse. The cycle also features discussions with people shaping artistic institutions in unconventional ways.
  • In times of tension and crisis, {Live} provides a shared space for reflection on contemporary art and its ability to respond to present‑day challenges, strengthening social resilience.

• Study Storage of the Collection

  • permanent display and temporary exhibitions

  • curator: Ewa Gorządek

• The Study Storage combines the functions of collection storage with education and curatorial programming. Organised to allow close public engagement during study visits, it will continue its collaboration with the Design Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in 2026. Students familiar with the MSK will create works inspired by the collection. Two meetings per month will focus on the collection and selected artists represented within it.
• In the adjacent Gallery 1 space, three solo exhibitions will be presented:
  • Piotr Bosacki (April–June), curator: Sara Szostak
  • Karolina Breguła (June–September), curator: Anna Czaban
  • Aneta Grzeszykowska (October–December), curator: Ewa Gorządek

• Music programme

  • curator: Michał Libera
• The music programme unfolds in three cycles—spring, summer, and autumn—each centred on sound installations.
  • The spring installation continues Erik Smith’s research‑art project Three Spaces Underground.
• The summer installation/intervention in the park is created especially for U–jazdowski by Mario de Vega.
  • The autumn installation will be Artificial Landscape by Justyna Stasiowska in collaboration with Miasto Pracownia.
• The cycles will include concerts, performances, sound presentations, discussions, and workshops inspired by themes introduced by the installations. The overarching framework is sound ecology, with the Castle’s architecture and surroundings serving as material and acoustic context. A sound‑mapping project of the Castle and its grounds will also be conducted.

• Nobody Reads This

  •  Art Book Fair

  • 22—24 May 2026

• The second edition of the Nobody Reads This: Art Book Fair will take place in the castle courtyard, this time with an international scope. The event has been created with the artistic, publishing, and design communities in mind – responding to the need for a space for regular meetings, the exchange of experiences, and the presentation of creative work in book form. The Centre for Contemporary Art welcomes print lovers and collectors, as well as anyone who is only just discovering the diversity of the publishing scene. In an age of digital overload, Nobody Reads This is an opportunity to focus on the personal, tangible experience of being with a book. It is also a space for publishers, designers, and artists to meet – a chance to talk and exchange experiences.