PBW - Polenbegeisterungswelle - Cultural Topographies of Polish Berlin, is a project presenting different generations of contemporary polish artists who live and work in Berlin.
Poland as homeland – be it as geographic, biographic, imaginative or emotional sphere – has, as one of many possible topological references, a varying effect on an artist's life and work. "Polenbegeisterungswelle" is to be understood as a modulation of the perception process "Polish culture". It embeds the country-of-origin-principle, still dominant in institutional contexts, in a reference frame consisting of other descriptors of urbanity such as occurrences, rhythms, cycles, auras, neighbourhoods, passions, flows and encodings.
We are not looking for commonalities between the work of political migrants and younger artists of the united Europe. We are rather drawing attention to individual artistic statements so as to open up spaces for personal narratives and overlapping references. A versatile and reciprocal relationship to Berlin as a cultural location may thus function as an interpretative bracket; the city itself turns out to be a sui generis document, a living archive in which everything conglomerates: space, time and actors.

A project of agitPolska e.V. and ARTUM Foundation ewa partum museum, supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) and by the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation. Curated by Jagna Anderson PhD, Iwona Bigos and Berenika Partum.