Opening: Crack Up – Crack Down

Opening of the "Crack Up – Crack Down" exhibition at the Warsaw CCA. At 20:00 in front of the Ujazdowski Castle the work "Medieval Songs I-XIII" by Lubomir Grzelak (aka Lutto Lento) will be presented.

Biting jokes, bantering drawings, activist interventions, ironic memes. How has humour evolved over last decades? Crack Up – Crack Down, an exhibition put together by the art collective Slavs and Tatars, is about satire: its power and its failings. Its first edition was presented at the 33rd Biennial of Graphic Art in Ljubljana, now at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, this global overview of satire as a graphic genre has been expanded to include new Polish contexts. Satire is equally moralising as it is critical: rampage and subversion are in its nature. It can mock but also terrorise. Humor of course changes with political shifts and technological development. Comedic expression is known to bloom particularly under authoritarian regimes – as was the case with the rich tradition of communist humour in Central and Eastern Europe, or the many examples from the Middle East. Satire can also be a tool of ideology even if it is well-fitted to unmask the mechanisms of authority. In these times of post-truth, it becomes a litmus paper of the public mood.

Artists: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Hamja Ahsan, Pablo Bronstein, Cevdet Erek, Arthur Fournier i Raphael Koenig, Martine Gutierrez, Flaka Haliti, Stane Jagodič, Zhanna Kadyrova, Sachiko Kazama, Dozie Kanu, KRIWET, Ella Kruglanskaya, Tala Madani, Marlie Mul, Woody de Othello, Alenka Pirman i KULA, Amanda Ross-Ho, Lin May Saeed, Top lista nadrealista, Endre Tot, Anna Uddenberg, Martina Vacheva, Nicole Wermers, Giorgi Xaniashvili, XIYADIE, Honza Zamojski oraz Bolesław Chromry, Rafał Dominik, Łukasz Kozak, Maria Magdalena Kozłowska, Lubomir Grzelak, Jana Shostak i Jakub Jasiukiewicz, Mikołaj Sobczak, Jacqueline Sobiszewski, Justyna Stasiowska, Ewa Tatar i Andrzej Szpindler