UpComing 2024. Selected Diplomas of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
After school club

Magdalena Komornicka

In a recent, high-profile essay, The Antisocial Century, American podcaster and journalist Derek Thompson¹ points out that people are spending more time alone today than ever before, citing the social and market mechanisms that contribute to this state of affairs.

The statistics on how much time we spend away from others are worrying indeed. In 2023, 74% of all traffic in US restaurants will come from take-out and home delivery orders, and the share of diners dining alone has increased by 29% in just the last two years. Today, the typical American adult buys an average of three cinema tickets a year and watches almost 19 hours of television a week, which is roughly equivalent to eight films. Young people are less likely than in previous decades to date, have more than one close friend/acquaintance or even hang out with friends. According to research cited by Thompson, the proportion of young people who say they meet friends almost every day after school has fallen by almost 50% since the early 1990s. This phenomenon is not just the domain of American society.

If anyone should feel thirsty for contact with the world, it seems to be twentysomethings who are still recovering from years of pandemonium. But if young adults feel overwhelmed by the emotional cost of spending time together – and are inclined to keep even close friends at a physical distance – it means that today’s reality (including, or perhaps especially, the digital one) is not only changing the idea of youth, but turning the psychology of friendship upside down.

Loneliness and solitude, however, are not the same thing. Feeling some loneliness is a healthy emotional response. It is an impulse to get up from the sofa and interact face-to-face. The exhibition of selected diplomas from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts’ 2024 After school club, of which the programme of accompanying events is an integral element, is just such an impulse. It is an invitation to talk and spend time together, to do things together after school or work, an invitation not only to get to know selected diploma works of last year’s graduates of nine faculties of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, but also to relax together, read books or listen to music.

An important element of many of the works presented in the exhibition is precisely the interaction with the public, the need to remain in relationship and in dialogue with the viewers and spectators. Many of the works are themselves spaces to spend time in; you can sit on them, lie down, touch them or listen and smell them. They resound with the need to build comfort, security and physical contact with another person. Many also appear as an invitation to an experience, an introduction to someone else’s world. Others, on the other hand, are personal stories touching on a very wide range of private and social themes. The after school club in the title refers to the diplomas presented in the exhibition, but also to what seems to be the most valuable and worth cultivating in art education today – the role of relationships and the importance of the resource of the group (peer, professional, social). A group that gives support but also feedback; that allows you to learn from each other, to inspire, to share knowledge and experiences; that makes it safe to make mistakes and to experience both positive evaluation and criticism.

UpComing is also an exhibition that symbolically marks the closing of a certain stage in the lives of the graduates – the moment when their education ends and their professional paths begin. That is why, together with male and female artists, we decided to move away from exhibiting diploma theses in the form presented at defences (and sometimes from presenting diploma thesis appendices). This time, the diplomas came into being in the exhibition through selected elements, creating individual artistic gestures and expressions, whose form of display results from the specific medium of a group exhibition intended for the general public. This change – from a presentation for the academic community to a presentation for the general public – is therefore not so much a moment of transition as a step forward. May this new chapter also be a time of staying in and creating relationships, networks, groups, communities and ecosystems!

And speaking of groups: every exhibition and book is a group effort. In addition to the artists and the curator, the After school club is made up of, among others, set designers Marcelina Gorczyńska and Kamila Falęcka (Turnus), authors of the graphic identity and the graphic design of the catalogue Zofka Kofta and Paulina Kolesnikowa, the author of the light design Aleksandr Prowaliński, and the producer and coordinator of the project Joanna Bury.

You are welcome to meet us at the exhibition!

¹ Derek Thompson, The Anti-Social Century, „The Atlantic”, February 2025, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/american-loneliness-personality-politics/681091/.