Konteksty / Contexts 2026

Konteksty / Contexts
12. Festival of Ephemeral Art, Sokołowsko
2026 Theme: Overturn
16-19 July, 2026

In the life of an individual and in collective history, there are moments that act as editing cuts: sudden, violent, and irreversible. Psychologists call them turning points; events that reorganize our identities, relationships, and existence. Historians define them as critical moments in which private biographies are intersected by major events: wars, migrations, revolutions, economic or social crises. These two perspectives, the personal and the political, are not separate from each other, but constantly intertwine. The exhibition looks at precisely these points of intersection. We are particularly interested in those moments that seem insignificant, but create a snowball effect leading to the titular upheaval, an irreversible change.

Inspired by the concepts and reflections of Hannah Arendt, Svetlana Alexievich, Dan McAdams, and Walter Mignolo, among others, we treat the story of existential upheavals as a story of regained or lost agency. The artists whose works we present record moments when everyday life is suddenly interrupted: the birth of a child, loss of a job, illness, change of identity, decision to migrate, but also experiences of war, political transformation, the collapse of institutions, as well as world-shaping breaks such as anti-colonial struggles and their reordering of political worlds, and acts of epistemic disobedience and delinking from dominant knowledge systems. In their works, these moments become not only autobiographical but also analytical material, telling us about the structures that shape the lives of individuals.

Anthropologist Victor Turner calls such moments “liminal,” suspended between the old and new orders. It is in this liminal space that art is born, capable of halting the movement of history and approaching it from a new perspective. Marianne Hirsch and Aleida Assmann, on the other hand, point out that upheavals do not end in the biography of an individual, but spread in waves through family and collective memory. We inherit them as emotions, behavioral patterns, gaps in stories.

The presented works reveal that moments of upheaval often remain invisible in official historical narratives. The systemic is reflected in the private, and the private becomes political. In the language of art, we see that life-changing moments do not always take the form of a catastrophe; sometimes they are quiet changes in rhythm, slight shifts in perspective that lead to a redefinition of oneself. These shifts are often also carried and transmitted through the body, existing and articulated through bodies, beyond the language of words.

Konteksty Festival of Ephemeral Art 2026 will showcase works that invite us to look closely at these transformations as the structure of life and history. It highlights that moments of upheaval are not so much a disruption of continuity as a revelation of it: a moment when what usually remains hidden becomes visible relationships of dependency, emotional labor, uncertainty about the future, mechanisms of power, but also the potential for resistance, care, and creativity

Marta Czyż and Dzekashu MacViban