The WRO Media Art Biennale is the major forum for new media art in Poland, and one of the leading international art events in Central Europe. Since its inception in 1989, WRO has been presenting art forms created using new media for artistic expression and communication, exploring current creative territories and building a critical perspective toward emerging issues in art, technology and society.
Every two years, Wrocław becomes a place of presentation for the most recent artistic practicies, combined with talks and meetings of artists and scientists with the participating audience, oscillating in variable dynamics between both contemplation and consideration, experience and confrontation.
Over the years, the WRO Biennales have raised a variety of questions about creative approaches to new technologies and the creative crossover realms that arise where art and science, economics and social activism intersect.
THIS YEAR'S EDITION
WRO 2017: Draft Systems – The context for the Biennale’s presentations and meetings in 2017 comprises a series of observations of the irreversible nature of some phenomena of the present. As some of the critics point out, the felt casing of the unsustainable welfare has overheated. The technological development – considered at all its stages – has proven costly to the planet; in the social processes and incorporated systems, we can see that the barely established synergy is getting dissociated again, democracy as best of the worst systems (“Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all other forms that have been from time to time”, Winston Churchill, 1947) seems to no longer be sustainable and loses its followers.
How does artistic outline this movement? Does it seize these variable conditions? Does it fully capture them and frame in the form of communication? To what extent does contemporary art reflect/express/drifts apart from these processes: always between draft and action, concept and manifestation? (DRAFT SYSTEMS)
The opening events of the WRO 2017 Biennale: 17–21 May (exhibitions through July 2017).