What do we remember from the past? How do we respond to instability? Where can we find resilience and hope in an ever-changing world? This dynamic programme of exhibitions, part of the UK/Poland Season 2025, explores memory, conflict and activism and features the work of 23 different artists, including Royal Academicians Grayson Perry and Goshka Macuga.
Born from collaborative dialogue with curators at the Centre for Contemporary Art Łaźnia (CCA Łaźnia) in Gdańsk, Remember Respond Resist features:
● A showcase of work by 21 internationally acclaimed artists from the British Council Collection, including Henry Moore, Hew Locke, Simon Norfolk, Lubaina Himid, David Shrigley and Andrzej Jackowski. The works on display include sculpture, textiles, taxidermy, painting, drawing and collage and are organised around the programme's three core themes. Remember explores memory and conflict. Respond examines our reactions to threats both as a wider society and as individuals, while the works in Resist explore opposition to challenging present-day realities through forms of protest.
● Work by two major artists who provide an insight into the social and political worlds of the UK and Poland. Grayson Perry's The Vanity of Small Differences - a series of six acclaimed tapestries created in 2012 that explore British fascination with taste and class through the fictional life story of a character named Tim Rakewell. A series of ten pieces by Goshka Macuga, a Polish-born artist who has lived and worked in the UK since 1989. Created between 2011 and 2021, they explores ideas of resistance and censorship, highlighting Poland's difficult transformation following the fall of communism in 1989, and the impact of targeted attacks against those who resisted the new government.
● The first-ever UK showing of Honorata Martin's 2013 film 'Going out into Poland' which records the experiences of the artist after she set off from her apartment in Gdańsk and headed south with neither a plan nor a destination. Martin walked for two months, avoiding large towns and relying on strangers for assistance and shelter along the way, carrying only a change of clothes, a sleeping bag and accompanied by her dog. The film – created several months after she returned home - explores memory and the re-processing of emotions as the shifting perception of lived experience versus what is remembered blur and intertwine.
● A presentation drawn from the archives at The Box that examines the historical and cultural ties between Plymouth and the Polish community. Following Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, many Polish troops fought for the allies with large numbers stationed around Plymouth during World War II. Many Polish servicemen subsequently settled in the city. The connection between the two countries deepened further in 1976 when Plymouth and Gdynia were twinned.