Between 2 and 7 November 2026, Wroclaw, Poland, will host ‘New Perspectives: International Festival of Performance Art’, which aims to reclaim the histories of performance art in Central and Eastern Europe, with a focus on artistic practices and reflection on the status of archives and cultural memory today. The history of performance in the region is conceived as a dynamic field in which meanings are continually negotiated, with the past regarded as an active participant in contemporary artistic practice.
The festival programme includes performances, debates, archive presentations and sessions dedicated to research methodologies in performance, with a particular focus on the documentation and archiving of ephemeral practices. In this way, the event transcends the conventional format of a festival to become a laboratory for the exchange of knowledge between artists, researchers, curators and institutions involved in contemporary art.
As part of the festival, the exhibition New Perspectives: The Archive will also open, conceived as an exploration of the documentation of performative artistic practices in Central and Eastern Europe. The exhibition reopens the archives, offering a cross-border perspective on art in the region. The materials and works on display come from Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia, Romania and Poland. The artists’ works, documentation of performance-based activities and the archives of art institutions come together to create a complex narrative about experimentation, alternative art circuits and the search for new forms of expression. The exhibition will feature, from Romania, the video works Box (1977) by Ion Grigorescu, Mâinile (1977) and Atelierul (1978) by Geta Brătescu, courtesy of the Ivan Gallery, and the cinematic essay În Marea Trecere (1971) by Mirel Ilieșiu, choreographed by Miriam Răducanu, courtesy of the National Film Archive.
On Thursday, 5 November, at 3.00 pm, Corina Cimpoieru, coordinator of the CNDB Archive, will take part in a panel discussion on performance archives in Hungary and Romania, giving a presentation on artistic practices involving the research and reactivation of archival documents, followed by the performance Solarisation, created by Sergiu Diță and presented at 6.00 pm in the Laboratory Theatre Hall at the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław.
Further information about the Festival and the programme can be found here: PROGRAMME – International Festival of Performance Art
