Festivalt is a program of performance and visual art that celebrates and investigates the complexities of the contemporary Jewish Polish landscape.
Post-communist Poland has gradually seen the development of a vigorous conversation about the Jewish past, present, and future, and that conversation includes sometimes surprising interlocutors: Polish Jews themselves, and Poles newly discovering their Jewish heritage; diaspora Jews discovering a feeling of connection to Poland; non-Jewish Poles struggling to negociate the Jewish absense. For years the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow has been a part of this conversation. This year the organizers and artists of Festivalt, who have been drawn into Polish Jewish culture in diverse ways, will join that conversation.
In this, our inaugural year, we offer 7 days of programming that directly addresses questions of identity, memory, and place here in Krakow. Using Poland as a cultural case study of both wealth and lack in a Jewish context, we will re-activate Jewish spaces with learning, site-specific interventions, theatre, performance art, discussions, photography, and music.
We’ve intentionally scheduled our program of events to complement the 27th year of the celebrated Jewish Culture Festival, which draws an international audience. We’ve invited dynamic artists and scholars to create new work that captures their unique experiences of Jewishness: old world, new world, backward-looking, forward-looking, centered on objects, sites, relationships, texts, inheritances, the body.
We invite you to join us—to bring your questions, your histories, your voices, to meet ours.
Financed by
The 1st edition of FestivALT was realized thanks to the support of the following institutions: Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, Paideia – The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden, Asylum Arts, Trzecie Oko Gallery.
