September 5, 2025
On the first weekend of September 2025, the SARP garden at Galeria Foksal became a space for performances created in response to an open call organized by the Gallery. This event marks the culmination of the project “No One Writes Manifestos Here Anymore.”
Instead of manifestos in their traditional form, the selected artists attempted a performative response — ephemeral, embodied, and open to interpretation. Together with curator Martyna Stołpiec and visual artist Ania Płonka, the creators developed forms that were not only presented live, but will also be preserved as video art, becoming a new link in the Foksal Gallery archive.
The event was not only a presentation of performances, but also a reflection on what a manifesto can be today — whether we still need it in art, or if its place has been taken by other forms of expression and dissent.
“In a gesture of radically inclusive empathy, on behalf of those whose lives have been subjected to control, I oppose (anthropo)patriarchal power that appropriates the bodies of others. I do not consent to enslavement, exploitation, discrimination, or objectification.
I demand the right to freedom for all — regardless of gender, social status, intelligence, ethnic, national, or racial belonging, species, skin color, hair, or feathers.
On behalf of those whom no one wants to listen to, I say: END HUMAN DOMINATION! ALL BODIES SHOULD BE FREE!”
Fot. Klementyna Dulak
“Let’s go back to Poland, 2012. I was terribly hyperactive back then. We’re going to secretly observe my slightly less hyperactive, older neighbor. Let’s dive into the absurdities of everyday life, where ordinary squabbles in the apartment building turn into micro-conflicts with political ambitions. By simulating pirouettes and arabesques in the Foksal graveyard, we’ll map out the sources of social conflict in Poland. Poland then and now seems sad. Let’s kick the ball around together and see whether we really have to get so pissed off — after all, all Poles are one family, older or younger, boy or girl.”
Fot. Klementyna Dulak
The performance “rex venationis” by Barbara Gryka and Maciej Kryński develops the artists’ earlier works addressing themes of power, ritual, and the grotesque. This time, the point of reference is hunting — one of the central practices of the Polish nobility, which functioned not only as a form of entertainment but, above all, as a staging of hierarchy and domination.
The piece reveals mechanisms of power based on the repetition of empty gestures: ceremonial commencement, the hunt, triumph, feast. Yet this entire order proves illusory — instead of trophies and glory, there is chaos, disappointment, and a desperate attempt to revive a dead ritual. It is a critical look at historical noble fantasies, which — though rooted in 17th-century treatises on hunting and courtly etiquette — continue to resonate disturbingly in contemporary Poland.
Fot. Klementyna Dulak
English (UK) 
Polski