Aneta Szyłak (1959-2023), recipient of AICA's Prize for Distinguished Art Critic in 2023, sadly passed away just a couple of weeks before the award ceremony. She is being honored for lifetime achievement, and the scope of her practice can hardly be summarized in a few sentences.
She was a critic and curator active both in Poland and internationally, as well as a translator of important critical texts (she translated into Polish, among others, "Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space" by Bryan O'Doherty). As a critic and curator, she built close and long-lasting relationships with artists. She accompanied them on their creative path, supported them and engaged in dialogue with them. The fruits of their collaboration were often solo exhibitions (such as two recent groundbreaking shows: Hiwa K's 2019 "Highly Unlikely but not Impossible" or Joanna Rajkowska's 2021 "Rhizopolis", both at the Zachęta National Art Gallery in Warsaw). However, Aneta has passed into the history of art in Poland primarily as a curator of group exhibitions – confronting pertinent issues in contemporary social life in the country and beyond – and as an organizer of cultural life.
The Gdansk Shipyard, the cradle of the Solidarity movement, played a special role in her biography. It was in its premises that Aneta founded and ran multiple organizations such as the Wyspa Institute of Art, Alternativa Foundation and, later, NOMUS The New Museum of Art (a branch of the National Museum in Gdansk). As she emphasized herself, her long-standing interaction with this place – as the heart of the labor movement before 1989, but also a victim of later deindustrialization – taught her attention to social inequalities and antagonisms.
Her deep social sensitivity was reflected in such hallmark exhibitions as “Guardians of the Docks” (Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk, 2005), “BHP” (Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk, 2004) or “Architectures of Gender” (SculptureCenter, New York, 2003).
In recent years, she was working on her doctoral thesis “Curating Context. The Palimpsest on the Quotidian and the Curatorial” as part of the Curatorial/Knowledge programme at Goldsmiths University of London and the University of Copenhagen. It certainly would have complemented the extensive list of her publications, which earned her multiple scholarships and accolades, including the 2004 Jerzy Stajuda Art Criticism Award.
She was an active member of AICA and served on the board of the Polish Section for several years. With her writings and curatorial endeavours, she made a substantial contribution to the development of experimental institutionalism, art-based research and feminist art discourse in Poland and beyond.
She will be missed dearly.
Arkadiusz Półtorak, President of AICA Poland