ACCESSS – REACTIONS virtual exhibition

•

ACCESS – REACTIONS | VII Best Media Arts Graduation Projects Competition

virtual gallery experience:

https://dyplomy2021.wrocenter.pl/

Project of a virtual exhibition- sculpted fountain in a form of Poland lets the user choose a city represented by a student at the competition. In there, the user can experience the documentation of the work as well as the Artists statements.

The exhibition was presented from 2nd to 23rd of July 2021 in Concordia Design Wrocław on Słodowa Island 7.

It has been the seventh edition of the Best Media Arts Graduation Projects Competition, organized jointly by the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław and the WRO Art Center. This year the competition exhibition, prepared in cooperation with Concordia Design Wrocław, took place within the framework of the Media Art Biennale WRO 2021 REVERSO . For the young participating artists it is a chance to present their works and for the audience to see them in the context of a major international event.

Every year the review of best bachelor’s and master’s theses takes place at eight state art academies in Poland: in Gdańsk, Katowice, Cracow, Łódź, Poznań, Szczecin, Warsaw and Wrocław, and the works for the competition exhibition in each academy are nominated by five-person committees.

In the history of the competition to date, the best diplomas have included video installations, computer animations, social media interferences, interactive and generative projects, audiovisual concerts, works on the borderline of bioart and neural networks, as well as performative activities using cosplay aesthetics and conventions of the gaming world, VR, 360° video or AI projects. Such diversity emphasizes the growing importance of technological tools within contemporary art and their role in shaping the reflection on the Now.

What do we see this year? Certainly it’s another exciting and diverse set of proposals from young artists – a broad spectrum of strategies employing media-based tools in the field of art.This time the competition takes place under constraints of the pandemic, the diploma projects have been created and were presented (or couldn’t be presented in full) during these special times.

This year, as many as four awards were planned for the Competition: The Main Prize of PLN 15,000, funded by the Minister of Culture, National Heritage and Sport, was awarded by an international jury of Ginan Seidl, Mindaugas Gapševičius and Stach Szabłowski. For the second time, the editors of “Contemporary Lynx” magazine awarded the selected artist with a portfolio publication and additional promotional activities. The audience was able to vote in the exhibition space, and that the viewers awarded their own, particularly valuable prize. A new feature was an award decided by the exhibition’s partner, the board of Concordia Design Wrocław.

Experience in working with graduates during the successive editions of the Competition will beard fruit this year in form of workshops on the professionalization of young artists, conducted by Magdalena Kreis and Adam Mazur.

The ONLINE version of the exhibition was created in cooperation with Krystian Grzywacz, the winner of the Competition in 2017 (main prize, BA diploma, Gdańsk) and in 2020 (Contemporary Lynx prize, MA diploma, Wrocław).