Wrocław Contemporary Museum in collaboration with the Institute of Art History at the University of Wrocław
invite to the conference “Thinking about PERMAFO – around Wroclaw Conceptualism”.

At the end of November 2012 Wroclaw Contemporary Museum opened Where is PERMAFO? exhibition, dedicated to art and creators grouped around the founders of PERMAFO gallery (1970-1981): Natalia LL, Andrzej Lachowicz, Zbigniew Dłubak and Antoni Dzieduszycki, an art critic.

PERMAFO was one of many artist-owned and curated galleries that emerged in the city in 1970’s, changing its face forever. As it was in the generation of Lachowicz when Wroclaw, turned from demolished Breslau Fortress and an uncertain stop for settlers and refugees who missed their former abandoned dwellings into a little homeland. Young people of that time graduated from local, Wroclaw schools and transformed the space around them with their stirred ambitions. It was in their generation that the change of artistic paradigm occurred – modernism with the cult of the Artist and a painting on canvas was abandoned in favour of a postmodernist game with the participation of viewers, where the notion of authorship gets fuzzy due to democratic and easily accessible procedures such as pressing a camera shutter release button. They were the first generation that did not perceive a career as filling museums with their works of art, they rather saw it in their lifestyles or in retreat from conformism and communist “little stabilisation”. Performing a local – and as it turned out later on, purely episodic – sexual revolution, preferring ephemeral actions and artworks immersed in the poetics of trace, they emphasised the primacy of life over art.

The exhibition in Wroclaw Contemporary Museum was an attempt to see the PERMAFO phenomenon from today’s perspective. Can we, from this point of view, notice any matters which had escaped critics’ attention before? What is PERMAFO’s legacy like? We would like this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue to provide the backdrop to considerations on the role of PERMAFO gallery for the Polish art.
Professor Anna Markowska, PhD – conference curator

Organisers:
Wrocław Contemporary Museum
Institute of Art History at the University of Wroclaw
Bartek Lis – coordinator

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME:
4.00 p.m. – 4.15 p.m. – opening of the conference, Dorota Monkiewicz, the Director of the Wrocław Contemporary Museum

4.15 p.m. – 4.30 p.m. Professor Anna Markowska, PhD (Institute of Art History, Wrocław University), Did the “Where is PERMAFO” exhibition revise our knowledge about Wrocław avant-garde?”

4.30 p.m. – 5.00 p.m. Professor Stefan Bednarek, PhD (Institute of Cultural Studies, Wroclaw University), Cultural Landscape of Middle Polish People’s Republic. With special regards to Wrocław.

5.00 p.m. – 5.25 p.m. Michał Jakubowicz, PhD (Institute of Graphics, SWPS), Constructs of reality in theory-practice of PERMAFO Gallery artists.

5.25 p.m. – 5.55 p.m. – Łukasz Guzek, PhD (Interfaculty Institute of Art Studies, Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk), PERMAFO – Gallery as a Performative.

5.55 p.m. – 6.30 p.m. – discussion (moderated by Anna Markowska)

6.30 p.m. – 6.45 p.m. coffee break

6.45 p.m. – 7.00 p.m. Ewa Odyjas, MA, (Faculty of Architecture, Silesian University of Technology), Natalia LL’s Intimate Architecture.

7.00 p.m. – 7.30 p.m. Professor Agata Jakubowska, PhD (Institute of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University), A few things that I still do not know about Natalia LL’s art.

7.30 p.m. – 8.00 p.m. A discussion (moderated by Anna Markowska)
 
8.00 p.m. – 8.05 pm. A presentation of a book dedicated to Zbigniew Dłubak (publisher: The Archeology of Photography Foundation)

Closure of the session.