Despite the prevailing pandemic and the closure of museum buildings, the Museum of the City of Gdynia is reaching out to art lovers with plans to open new exhibitions, available in the form of virtual tours. The exhibitions, depending on developments in the country and the world, will be made available to visitors in the traditional manner over time.
Gdynia - Tel Aviv (30.04.2020- )
The Gdynia installment of the "Gdynia - Tel Aviv" exhibition, which was organized in 2019 at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw, will open on April 30. Its originator and curator is art historian Artur Tanikowski. In a revised formula, the exhibition will visit the Museum of the City of Gdynia thanks to the cooperation between the two museums and with the support of the City of Gdynia.
Both Gdynia and Tel Aviv were established almost from scratch, growing in the shadow of more powerful and older centers - Gdansk and Jaffa. For both, the impetus for development was the difficult geopolitical situation, the coastal location and the great expectations placed on them. Both cities became peculiar cities of migrants, while witnessing, through their ports ("gateways to the world") the transfer of people, goods, ideas.
Gdynia - Tel Aviv
photo: Mateusz Kozielecki
For the purposes of the exhibition in Gdynia, architecture will become the basic thread and axis of the narrative. It is unquestionably the main, directly evocative "common denominator" for both cities, which, both in the symbolic layer and in propaganda rhetoric, were referred to as "white". On the Polish Baltic Sea and in a Jewish enclave in the Middle East, modernist "cities of the future" were created less than a century ago, whose universal means of expression became architecture. The architectural dimension of the exhibition will be shaped primarily by mock-ups of iconic buildings of Gdynia and Tel Aviv. The creators of the Gdynia installment of the exhibition will devote special attention to the similarities and differences between the two cities, in terms of the urban layout, the character of development, the masses of buildings, as well as the functions they performed. The historical context will also occupy an important place in the exhibition space, and many other themes will appear as part of educational and popularization activities.
Gdynia - Tel Aviv
photo: Mateusz Kozielecki
The exhibition, adapted to the conditions and space of the Gdynia museum, as well as to the expectations of Tricity audiences, was prepared by a team of MMG staff under the direction of historian Marcin Szerle and architect and researcher Anna Orchowska-Smolinska. The Gdynia installment of the exhibition is a contemporary look at the history of the two cities, which are so distant and yet so similar, through the prism of their unique architectural heritage. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog edited by Artur Tanikowski, published jointly by the POLIN Museum and the Museum of the City of Gdynia.
You can read a review of an earlier installment of the exhibition in the March issue of A&B.
Janusz Kaniewski.
Polish Projects Polish Designers
(Summer 2020)
The hero of the next, seventh exhibition in the series Polish Projects Polish Designers will be Janusz Kaniewski, the prematurely deceased designer, a man full of vision. He was strongly associated with Gdynia, co-founded the Gdynia Design Days festival, and advised the Mayor of Gdynia on the aesthetics of the city. The year 2020 marks the 5th anniversary of his death.
Janusz Kaniewski
photo: Mateusz Nasternak
The exhibition at the Museum of the City of Gdynia, engaging all the senses of the audience, will present the work of Janusz Kaniewski, an internationally recognized Polish car designer sensitive to the problems of public space. Janusz Kaniewski's original design drawings and his completed projects will be presented in an attractive way. Visitors will be able to explore the world of ideas close to his heart, including a look at design as a tool that improves the functionality of our surroundings and co-creates a better future. The exhibition will be complemented by multimedia elements: a film about the designer, an interactive application and a Polish-Englishcatalog. Anna Sliwa is the curator of the exhibition.
Janusz Kaniewski. Polish Projects Polish Designers
© organizers archive
Exhibitions in the series Polish Projects Polish Designers so far are the only event in Poland periodically showing the achievements of Polish designers. As part of the series, the Museum of the City of Gdynia has decided to show both doyens of Polish design with enormous achievements, and young, dynamic creators who already have to their credit important and inspiring design and production achievements. The new exhibition series was inaugurated in 2014 with the exhibition of Zbigniew Horbowy, an acclaimed creator of artistic and applied glass. In the following years, the works of Tomasz Rygalik, Marek Cecula, Oskar Zięta, Karol Sliwka and Barbara Hoff were presented.
elaborated. ed.
based on a press release
