Due to the ongoing pandemic, the festival's organizers have decided to move the event from June to September this year. This year's edition will be held at the inaccessible Port Miejski pumping station on Kleczkowska Street in Wroclaw. The main theme not only refers to the location, but also to the current situation.
The18th edition of the SURVIVAL Art Review was scheduled to begin on June 26, but due to the epidemic situation it has been moved to autumn and will be held from September 10-13.
"Wasteland " - the watchword of the 18th edition of the Review is a reference to the best-known work by T. S. Eliot. "Wasteland" ("The Waste Land") is a fundamental work of modernist poetry, in which war trauma, quotations from world literature and everyday noises intertwine to create a picture of a world marked by transience, full of anxiety and an abashed culture. Eliot finished "Wasteland" while undergoing treatment for a nervous breakdown, staying in the seaside town of Margate. "Wasteland" seeks to look at the stuttering flashpoints in "Barren Land," which even today seem to indicate uncertainty, mark change, examine memory and question rebirth, and hold the future at a distance, under questioning.
The sewage pumping station was built between 1898 and 1901on a promontory located along the Oder River waterfront
© organizers' press materials
SURVIVAL's identification - inspired by horror movie posters - shows an arranged view from inside the Port Miejskai pumping station - this year's Review location. The pumping station was built between 1898 and 1901on a promontory located along the Oder River waterfront. For more than 100 years it was a key component of an extensive, ecological wastewater treatment system - one of the oldest in Europe - launched in 1881. The pumping station building was designed by renowned Wroclaw architects Richard Plüddemann and Karl Klimm. It has survived to this day in almost intact condition. It is in it that dozens of artists will present their works.
SURVIVAL Art Review
SURVIVAL is an artistic endeavor calculated to maximize confrontation with the viewer, carried out in public spaces outside exhibition institutions. The ambition of the Review's organizers is to introduce the problems raised by young contemporary art into the social discourse and provoke the audience to lively reactions. SURVIVAL's artists take up the challenge of the urban jungle, carrying out their projects in abandoned places, public edifices and open spaces. Art realized outside areas where its presence is justified and protected, collides with the reality annexed by mass media, advertising, economics and politics.
