Conference

  • Oskar Hansen: Opening Modernism
    Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw
    Jun 06, 2013 to Jun 07, 2013
  • GRANTEE
    Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
    GRANT YEAR
    2012

Oskar and Zofia Hansen, music pavilion for Contemporary Music Festival in Warsaw, 1958. Courtesy of Igor Hansen (from the archive of Oskar Hansen).

The aim of this two-day international conference and its collateral events is to address the outstanding, but not widely recognized oeuvre of Oskar Hansen—Polish architect, urban planner, teacher and theorist, former student of Pierre Jeanneret and Fernand Léger, and a member of Team 10. The conference aims to gather an international forum of prominent researchers from the fields of architecture, fine arts, and the social sciences, to examine and discuss Hansen's work, as well as to stimulate a debate on his place in the history of art and architecture. The submitted papers form a conceptual basis for Oskar Hansen's exhibition at MACBA, Barcelona, planned for 2014, and contribute to an extensive multilingual publication. The conference forms part of a complex research project dedicated to Oskar Hansen, launched by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in collaboration with MACBA, Barcelona, which is comprised of an exhibition, publications, and a digitalization of the architect's archive.

Conference participants: Claire Bishop (CUNY), Jola Gola (Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw), Svein Hatloy (Bergen School of Architecture), Maroje Mrduljas (University of Zagreb), Akos Moravanszky (ETH Zurich), Joan Ockman (University of Pennsylvania), Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (Yale University), Grzegorz Piątek (Centrum Architektury), Felicity Scott (Columbia University), Karol Sienkiewicz (independent critic, Vancouver), £ukasz Stanek (Manchester Architecture Research Centre), Mark Wasiuta (Columbia University) and Axel Wieder (Arnolfini Museum, Bristol), among others.

Tomasz Fudala, consultant of the part of the conference concerning exhibition pavilions and display architecture, is an art historian and curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Fudala has previously worked at the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and Warszawski Aktyw Artystow. His writings have appeared in Domus, Artforum, Odra, Obieg, Czas Kultury, and Autoportret. He is interested in architecture and the history of exhibitions, which was the subject to his latest project The Space Between Us.

Aleksandra Kedziorek, coordinator of the Hansen project at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, received her MA in art history at the University of Warsaw. As a student, she participated in several international research projects on architectural history and contributed as a curatorial or research assistant to exhibitions on modern and contemporary architecture at SPOT Gallery in Poznan, the Fourth Design Festival in Lodz, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. She has been awarded scholarships from DAAD and Poland’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

Lukasz Ronduda, curator of the project, assistant professor at the Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities and curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw is the author of Subversive Strategies in the Media Arts (Cracow, 2006) and Polish Art of the 1970s: Avant-Garde (Warsaw, 2009). He is the editor of 1, 2, 3 ... Avant-Gardes: Film/Art between Experiment and Archive (with F. Zeyfang, Berlin 2007); Polish New Wave: History of a Phenomenon that Never Existed (with B. Piwowarska, Warsaw 2008); and Distribution of the Neoavant-Garde: Art in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism, Posthumanism, and Complexity Sciences (Warsaw, 2009), among others. He is also the curator of 1, 2, 3 ... Avant-Gardes (CCA, Warsaw, 2006; Kuenstlerhaus, Stuttgart, 2007; Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, 2007); KwieKulik: Form Is a Fact of Society (BWA, Wroclaw, 2010); Operator's Exercise: Open Form Film and Architecture (Arthur Ross Architectural Gallery, Columbia University, New York, 2010); and Future under Communism (Nottingham Contemporary, 2010).

Lukasz Stanek, consultant of the part of the conference concering architectural history and theory for the conference, is the 2011–13 A. W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Besides publications in books and journals, Stanek authored Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and he is currently editing Henri Lefebvre’s unpublished book about architecture, Vers une architecture de la jouissance (1973). Both projects have received support from the Graham Foundation. Stanek’s second field of research is the export of architecture and urbanism from socialist countries to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East during the Cold War, and he published recently “Miastoprojekt Goes Abroad. Transfer of Architectural Labor from Socialist Poland to Iraq (1958—1989)” in The Journal of Architecture, vol. 17, no. 3, 2012. He has taught at the ETH Zurich and Harvard Graduate School of Design, among others.

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw is a national cultural institution established by the Minister of Culture of the Republic of Poland on April 29, 2005. As of January 2008, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw has run its program of activities in a temporary space on 3 Panska St. in central Warsaw, in the vicinity of the future permanent seat of the Museum. The exhibitions, events, educational programs, and publications provided by the Museum today help to develop the full range of activities the Museum will run in the future. The Museum is constantly expanding its offerings to the public, focusing on modern and contemporary art, graphic and industrial design, and architecture. The Museum's main mission today is to develop a comprehensive art collection, relevant for the Museum's institutional outlook and new building.