The WRO Media Art Biennale is the major forum for new media art in Poland, and one of the leading international art events in Central Europe. Since its inception in 1989, WRO has been presenting art forms created using new media for artistic expression and communication, exploring current creative territories and building a critical perspective toward emerging issues in art, technology and society.
REVERSO – inversion and conversion. Exiting the gallery and entering the studio, as well as the open air and city space as an art scene. The launch of various paths of contact between viewers and participants includes a programme of multi-month presentations, taking place both in real exhibition spaces in Wrocław and in galleries and exhibition halls of other places (REVERSO REDUX programme).
External and internal artistic actions and activities, comprehensive access to contemporary art and its popularization on various platforms combining reality and the digital. Searching for a qualitative path in art and redefinition of development in opposition to the idea of building meaning through con-tinuous growth. Exhibitions, shows, connections. The international voice of artists and its perception as a material of a long series of events adapting to new, non-obvious, complex conditions of pre-senting contemporary art. Activism, critical reflection and imagination in artistic practice and com-munication. Consumption analysis, cumulativity, reused materials, items and states recovered as an art form.
Exhibitions and shows are to combine the sphere of artistic communication in physical space with remote presentation via the web.
New questions – how to overcome the limits of digitization of culture, extracting from it what is most valuable, without making the viewer a consumer of network content. How to maintain the attention of the viewer, deprived of community experience and saturated with network stimuli.
The WRO Biennale programme is a search for answers.
In the preparations for the Biennale, the issues of hybrid activity and limitation of participation in the physical world, difficulties in direct contact with art and artistic events were particularly emphasized. WRO tries to develop a number of its own practices in response to the closing of the possibility of experiencing contact with works, shared experience and reception. Documentation and network participation media technologies have changed dynamically, as well as receiving preferences, new sharing standards have become popular. At the same time, the great value of the archives and doc-umentation was highlighted, which turned out to be both the tool and the content of the message. During the hardest period of closure, the applications developed by WRO enabled the participation of viewers, including the youngest ones, to independently make visual and audio artistic creations. This outlines the scope of the necessary efforts in the field of art and sets the impulse of REVERSO: creating a joint canvas of contact in art with the audience. The presentation and dissemination of the elements of this process in various forms is one of the main and most demanding program-ming, curatorial and promotional challenges of this edition.
The year program is be labeled with tags. Complementary pairs of tags introduce four interpretive dominants relevant to each of the stages of the biennial by the end of the year but also mark nodes that strengthen the perception of the entire program through mutual relations of meanings.
The Biennale has start in May with #artificial intelligence and community, to continue with #artificial intelligence #community # climate #city (June – July), #climate #city (August – September), #groundsoftart # scale (October), #artists # digital trace (november – december)
