Opening: Friday July 18th, 6 p.m The global landscape of climate, health, military, technological, and socio-economic threats is becoming increasingly visible. But what does this multidimensional crisis mean for the individual? A shared thread running through private experience is a sense of powerlessness, a crisis of democracy, and a growing erosion of civil liberties. Personal freedom—long inaccessible for many—is now quietly slipping away, disappearing drop by drop. The exhibition Freedom Leaks: Loud Whistles and Little Bells presents the responses of two generations of Polish artists to this mounting deficit of freedom. Artists become “whistleblowers”, exposing the growing pressure placed on individuals from the surrounding webs of dependency. Their works act as records of personal perspectives and lived experiences. They show how, under the guise of ensuring security, pursuing noble ideals, or invoking real or fabricated “states of higher necessity,” we begin to lose what is most precious. This erosion of freedom unfolds in stages—it is never taken from everyone at once, nor all at the same time. The moment we divide into groups, encouraged towards mutual hostility, is terrifying. Step by step, polarization reaches a point where we begin to think of people in terms of us/other and human/non-human. The law starts to be used instrumentally against selected groups. Our relationships—at work, in local communities, and within families—begin to erode. When this happens, and the official language of global politics begins to resemble the language of fascism, it becomes the duty of artists to sound the alarm.
Organizer: University Of The National Education Commission
Co-organizer: The Three Seas Art Foundation
Image: Anna Skowron, Faces, site specific in the Błędowska Desert, 2024