MOCAK 2026
Kraków 30-702
Poland
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–7pm
The fifteenth anniversary of the MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, which falls in 2026, will be a time of exceptional artistic intensity and a look into the future. It will also be the first year under the guidance of the new director Adam Budak. The focus will be on exhibitions by three internationally renowned artists: Ewa Partum, Kiki Smith, and Eleanor Antin. Long overdue, the program will be enriched with strong and important positions represented by female artists. And these are not the only strong feminist voices that will build a space for dialogue with art in our museum!
In 2026, we can look forward to three seasons and major events connected with the opening of new exhibitions by renowned artists—from March 7, we will see the exhibition Ewa Partum: Contemplating Art, Contemplating Love (season I), on July 25—Kiki Smith: Human Condition (season II), and on December 5, Eleanor Antin: Retrospective (season III).
Ewa Partum (born 1945) is celebrating her 80th birthday and 60th anniversary of her artistic career. She is one of the most important and courageous conceptual artists of the second half of the 20th century, recognized as a pioneer of feminist art and body art in Poland and Europe. Her works have been shown at numerous international exhibitions, and her installations and performance documentation are included in the collections of institutions such as MoMA and Tate Modern. Partum not only broke taboos related to physicality, sexuality, and femininty, but also developed the language of art as a tool for emancipation, social and political criticism, and a space for dialogue on power, identity, and freedom. Her courage became a manifestation of how art can be a form of political action that not only comments on the world but also actively transforms it.
The first retrospective exhibition in Poland of American artist Kiki Smith (born 1954), one of the key figures of the feminist movement in contemporary art, will engage in a dialogue with the local context, the history of women’s art, and issues of physicality and ecology. The title of the exhibition, Human Condition, echoes that of Hannah Arendt’s work, in which the philosopher analyzed the human condition through the categories of work, action, and creation. Kiki Smith’s work provokes an ethical analysis of times of social instability, asking questions about morality and responsibility for action, while at the same time allowing us to explore Arendt’s concept of amor mundi, love of the world – love based on understanding and critical reflection.
The Eleanor Antin: Retrospective exhibition will be the first and largest retrospective in Europe of this outstanding American artist. Over 80 works, selected on the basis of in-depth research and prepared in collaboration with Eleanor Antin (born 1935) and international institutions, present the full spectrum of her work. Antin combines feminist themes with conceptual art, moving between the visual arts, literature, and performance. The exhibition, co-produced with the MUDAM Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg and the Liechtenstein Museum of Art, will be accompanied by lectures and an academic conference.
In 2026 (July 25–October 25), there will also be a presentation of the latest works by Wilhelm Sasnal (born 1972)—one of the most recognizable contemporary Polish painters, whose works are included in the MOCAK Collection. For years, the artist has been developing themes such as memory and oblivion, media images, privacy and the political nature of everyday life, and the relationship between humankind and nature in his work.
Each of the three seasons will be packed with numerous other exhibitions and activities. During Season I, we will also see the exhibition Toyen: Dreaming in the Margins, curated by Adam Budak, an exhibition-cum-story about one of the most intriguing and elusive figures of European surrealism. It is the story of a dreamer who consciously chose the margins, and for whom art became a tool of emancipation and transgression.
We will also see the first site-specific project at MOCAK. During her year-long residency, Katarzyna Krakowiak-Bałka will work with the architecture of the museum building. The installation Nest will be the first act of the residency, in which the museum is treated as an organism—existing architecture that can be overwritten, renegotiated, and supplemented with new layers of meaning.
Marta Romankiv, Dominik Stanisławski, and Łukasz Surowiec will form an artistic collective. For a month, they will renovate the Beta Gallery, preparing the space for planned exhibitions, thus making the very institution’s infrastructure itself a field of artistic activity.
In March, the Re Gallery space will begin operating in a new form as re:primer—a laboratory for new practices at the interface of visual arts, curating, music, and other creative activities. Curated by Arkadiusz Półtorak and Martyna Nowicka, re:primer will hack the museum’s program, open it up to collaboration with new communities, and break down existing exhibition formats.
After a break of several years, the festival Krakow Photomonth returns to MOCAK to present a solo exhibition by Annette Kelm, a German visual artist who uses photography to explore the history of objects and their ideological entanglements. The exhibition Speak, Volumes (March 7, 2026–June 14, 2026) will be the first installment of the festival’s main program, dedicated to exploring German-German and Polish-German relations in an era of narrative crisis, declining trust, and resurgent populism.
With the launch of the exhibition Season I in 2026, the presentation of flags in front of the Museum building will become an integral part of each opening. They will be created by: Monika Drożyńska (March 7–June 14, 2026), Clémentine Deliss (July 25–October 25, 2026), and Paulina Ołowska (December 5, 2026–March 21, 2027). They will be autonomous works, but also a complement to the exhibitions, and a form of dialogue with them.
Last but not least, the 2026 exhibition program will be complemented by the presentation of the works by South African artist Gabrielle Goliath and Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour. The year 2026 will be crowned by the new exhibition of MOCAK collection, focused on the works of female artists.
