Jarosław Lubiak

Day 1: Conflicts, Crises, and the Politics of Growth

Perspective 1 – 5 November 2021.

Jarosław Lubiak, Dr. Art College, Szczecin, Poland.

Abstract

Curating Resources: Museums and Deep Adaptation

Deep adaptation is the process that James Bendell proposes as the only accurate response to environmental destruction. He takes the collapse as unavoidable and close. Instead of thinking about avoiding it, he argues for adjusting and conforming. The idea of deep adaptation opens a conceptual horizon for thinking about museums and their social functions. Starting from the case study of the Plasticity of the Planet[JW1] program presented at the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art in 2019, my presentation will develop some proposals of deep adaptation for art institutions. Confronted with the logic of destructive plasticity, the entire field of art will have to become more and more plastic to face the irreversible. For museums, it means a shift to what I propose to call the curating resources as a way to expand the curatorial approach to all aspects of museums’ functioning.

Biography

Dr Jarosław Lubiak is an academic teacher, art theorist, and freelance curator. In 2014–2019, he was artistic director at Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art (U-jazdowski) in Warsaw, Poland. In 1996–2014 he worked at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź as a curator and head of the Modern Art Department. He recently curated Angelika Markul: Time Formula at Openheim, Wrocław, Poland, 2021; The Plasticity of the Planet – a long-term program addressing climate catastrophe, including two parallel exhibitions Human-Free Earth, Forensic Architecture: Centre for Contemporary Nature at U-jazdowski, and publications: Becoming Earth and Plasticity of the Planet: On Environmental Challenge for Art and Its Institutions (2019). Among many other projects, he co-curated (with Ula Tornau and Anna Czaban) the Lithuanian and Polish exhibition in two episodes Waiting for Another Coming at the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius and U-jazdowski, 2018–2019; curated The State of Life: Polish Contemporary Art within the Global Context at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, 2015; and co-curated with Małgorzata Ludwisiak Correspondances: Modern Art and Universalism at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2012. He was a member of the curatorial team of Europe (to the Power of)—the project led by Barbara Steiner on behalf of the Goethe Institute, London, and co–realized by ten partners in Europe and China (2012–2013), and of Scenarios about Europe—at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig, Germany (2011–2012). He has authored numerous articles and edited several books and catalogues, including Pandemics: Science, Art, Geopolitics, with Mikołaj Iwański (Szczecin–Poznań: 2018); The Afterimages of Life: Władysław Strzemiński and the Rights for Art (Łódź: 2012); Museum as a Luminous Objects of Desire (Łódź: 2007). As a curator and art theorist, he focuses on the crossovers between contemporary art, philosophy, and the social sphere, clashes of aesthetics and politics, friction among art institutions, political economy, and environmental crises.