Image: MOCAK, Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków
MOCAK, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków, will open 'Stan posiadania. Topografia Kolekcji MOCAK-u – część I' on 24 July 2026, presenting a temporary exhibition built from the museum’s own collection and organised around five metaphorical chapters: Ruiny, Zakamarki, Błota, Szafy and Wiosny. The show is scheduled to run until 18 October 2026 at MOCAK in Kraków, with curator Kamil Kuitkowski leading the project and Marta Mosiołek named for exhibition arrangement and visual identity.
According to the museum’s exhibition text, 'Stan posiadania' begins from a condition of lack: of time, stability and, above all, financial resources. MOCAK describes the exhibition as emerging from the implosion of the institution’s budget and the exhaustion of the resources needed to realise its planned programme. Rather than treating crisis as a dead end, the curatorial framing says the museum aims to seize it as a starting point for different models of working with the collection and for rethinking how the exhibition is built.
The museum positions the project as a kind of ironic balance sheet for the institution. It is made from objects in the collection, but it also points to less tangible assets: the people working at MOCAK, its audiences, procedures, archives, history, image, imaginings and possible futures. The exhibition text links this approach to broader reflection on how museums are shaped by funding structures, regulations and institutional vulnerability, and it presents the show as an unfinished and provisional attempt to take stock of the museum’s condition.
The five-part structure gives the exhibition its title’s topographical logic. Each section addresses the collection from a different angle and uses different visual and symbolic tools. MOCAK says the selection draws on works that are often being shown publicly for the first time, or have not previously been displayed in the museum. The exhibition also places the collection in relation to three recurring fields: conceptual art, Fluxus-related works and objects that recall the logic of the classical cabinet of curiosities.
The museum’s online preview names works by Agata Siwek, Janina Turek, Mikołaj Smoczyński, Sarah Lucas and Katarzyna Kozyra among the pieces associated with the exhibition. The text situates these works within a larger field of artists represented in the collection, including Joseph Beuys, Oskar Dawicki, Joanna Rajkowska, Robert Kuśmirowski, Piotr Uklański and many others. MOCAK’s own description emphasises that the collection is treated as a complete structure in which fullness and emptiness, accumulation and absence, are constantly in tension.
The exhibition opening is listed for 24 July 2026, with the museum’s event schedule giving opening hours of 11:00 to 21:00 on that day. The exhibition page places the show on level 0 of MOCAK and credits the museum’s team collaborators across many departments. The museum’s website also notes that MOCAK is open Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00 to 19:00, at Lipowa 4 in Kraków.
