“A key context for the artworks shown in the festival is the history of the transformation, which has impacted the changes on Plac Defilad since 1989. In recent decades, the capital’s urban life has filled the space of the square with its energy. Bus stations, parking lots, market halls, and street food stalls have all risen and fallen in this space. The square has not always shared the same dynamic change experienced in some other districts of Warsaw, but it has never stood empty. Many grassroots and official initiatives have been attempted here, as presented at this year’s exhibition in the installation by CENTRALA. On a long market-stall table, this Warsaw-based architectural duo collected photographic documentation of the everyday use of this place: a staging ground for mass events, decorations for street festivals or national holidays, and the propagandist and commercial methods for creating spectacle using this large open space.” Curatorial team
The Phantom Museum by Daša Anosova, Olga Gaidash, Ivan Bazak and Violette e a – the display case was crated by the artists and CENTRALA.
Display case, 2024 CE, 21st century
Repurposed oriented strand board (OSB) and medium-density fibreboard (MDF)
A double-layered horizontal platform, a type of spatial display in which objects can be sunk below the lower layer, semi-hidden. The plat- form has been made by Centrala (Małgorzata Kuciewicz and Simone De Iacobis), a team of Warsaw-based architects, in collaboration with an artist Violett e a. They used found materials from the “Real” Museum storage; this includes scraps from previous shows, such as “A Tiger Came into the Garden”, a retrospective of Maria Prymachenko’s oeuvre. The architects worked from mental images of recently-looted museum vit- rines, images that have become ubiquitous in recent media coverage of Ukraine. The vitrine-platform is leveled to the ground, reminiscent of something between a deconstructed architectural structure and a ruin.
Text from the Phantom Museum booklet