The exhibition title of the main exhibition of the Three Seas Art Festival 2025 has been drawn from an essay by Danish social anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup. In it, the author concludes that creativity is a process that occurs between talented individuals and the culture in which they operate. In her view, being creative is not only about discovering things that did not previously exist but also about proposing new ways of understanding the reality we already know by revealing what is only faintly intuited. The curatorial team’s task was to identify key intersections and crucial themes, capturing common threads in the work of artists from 14 countries who participated in the project.
The organizers invited cultural institutions from the countries belonging to the Three Seas Initiative—Austria, Bulgaria, Czechia, Greece, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Hungary—as well as from Denmark, Turkey, Ukraine, and the Civil Society of Belarus. Each institution selected a curator and an artist or artistic collective who proposed a work on a topic of their choice from a broad range of issues related to fair development. The joint exhibition was preceded by two artistic residencies. Some of the artists created works during their stay in Kraków, while others used this time for research.
The exhibition is part of a new Central European project that, in future editions, is set to travel to other locations across the region. In line with the vision of its initiators—institutions forming the Three Seas Initiative Cultural Cooperation Network (3SICCN)—art is to be seen as a means of anticipating and prototyping solutions to the most pressing challenges of our time. Perhaps, in this context, the works on display also serve as a preview of a new order, one whose presence we can only faintly intuit.
Artists: Pavla Beranová / Jiří Suchánek, Uršula Berlot, Ričardas Bartkevičius / Vaiva Jucevičiūtė-Bartkevičienė, Gözde Ju, Morus Project (Kleopatra Tsali, Hanna Norrna, Irini Gonou), Ciprian Mureşan, NURT (Mykhaylo Barabash, Tereza Barabash, Roman Haideichuk, Yaryna Shumska), Kristoffer Ørum, Anna Pichura, Wendelin Pressl, Ala Savashevich, Dimitar Shopov, Erik Sikora, Rita Süveges
Curators: Kata Balázs-Miklós, Weronika Plińska, Agnieszka Sachar
Co-organizers: University of the National Education Commission in Kraków, Three Seas Arts Foundation
