June Art Break! The 23rd SURVIVAL Art Review in the Casemates of Leśnica Castle
How much time do we spend bored, and how much working? The Art Transparent Foundation invites you to reflect on time, labor, and attention in an age of sensory overload. The 23rd edition of the SURVIVAL Art Review will take place over the long June weekend (June 18–22, 2025) in the casemates of the 800-year-old castle in Leśnica – within the space of the former Forty Club and the surrounding park.
Who will be exhibiting at the Review?
This year’s open call for artistic proposals received hundreds of submissions. The curatorial team – Michał Bieniek, Daniel Brożek, Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz, and Ewa Pluta – selected several works that will be presented in the Castle, the outbuilding, and the park.
Artists selected through the open call include: Martyna Baranowicz, Maciej Cholewa, Maks Cieślak, Roberto Cura, Ewa Dąbkowska, Jagoda Dobecka, Łukasz Horbów, Filip Jakubowski, Maja Janczar, Paweł Franciszek Jaskuła, Julia Królikowska, Jakub Leniart, Piotr Mlącki, Irmina Murawska, Miguel Rozas Balboa, Szymon Szewczyk, Anna Sztwiertnia, Kacper Wiatrak, Paulina Włostowska, Katarzyna Wójcicka, and the Babirot Collective (Olga Budzan, Ewa Głowacka, Emilia Konwerska, Dominika Kulczyńska, Laura Malinowska, Anna Pastuszka, Marta Sieczkowska, Ewa Zwarycz).
The full list of participating artists will be announced in mid-May.
Theme: Time and Focus
The 23rd SURVIVAL – titled “3s/8h” – focuses on the relationship between time, work, and attention. It references historical demands of labor movements for an eight-hour workday and contrasts them with today’s three-second attention span on social media. It is an invitation to reflect on how we manage time – as individuals and as a society – in the age of overstimulation, flexible employment, and constant availability.
The theme also resonates with the place and time of the exhibition (the long June weekend), highlighting the historical perception of time. Concepts like “leisure” or “boredom” were for centuries a privilege of the aristocracy and nobility. Today, attention has become the new measure of time and a currency in the information economy. Work is no longer tied to specific hours – efficiency and task completion matter more. At the same time, we are all participants in the attention economy, which disrupts traditional ideas of productivity.
Rest and Be Bored – Together
The Art Transparent team recommends arriving at the festival by bike – for example, via scenic routes along the Oder river embankments – or by train, just fifteen minutes from the Main Station. In the castle park, visitors will find the Festival Club with snacks and drinks – a place to connect with others or simply relax under the trees, on the grass, or on deckchairs. Lush greenery and nearby water will offer a refreshing escape during the June heat.
Each day, visitors can also attend accompanying events as part of the rich Social Stage program. There will be talks, lectures, and meetings. Alek Hudzik from Mint Magazine will discuss who stole our free time. The Narutowicz Institute will explore the economies of attention and anger. SWPS University will speak about new technologies in the context of human relationships and the sharing economy.
Anna Siekierska will invite guests to participate in a field game as part of her The Big Green project. The organizing team, along with partners from Southeast Africa, will again highlight the artistic initiatives and relationships built as part of the Deconfining project. The Polish premiere of the new film School of Mutants will also take place. The program also includes curatorial tours and guided visits for groups with special needs, such as families with children or linguistic minorities.
The SURVIVAL Art Review is organized by the Art Transparent Foundation, which has been supporting art in Wrocław for 20 years.
We now understand that the passage of time varies under different conditions: at the beginning of the universe, it flowed much more slowly than it does today; it also slows near a black hole, eventually halting entirely at its event horizon. On a cognitive level, our relationship to time is equally complex. With age, the passage of time often feels accelerated. Psychologists observe a connection between this sensation and the number of cycles we have experienced – such as annual, monthly, and other recurring patterns. Each successive cycle seems to pass increasingly unnoticed. In a sense, we automate our perception of time, leading to its subjective compression.
In the modern era, time became a class-related concept. In economies reliant on systems of slave labour – primarily in the colonies, but also in serfdom-dependent societies such as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – time existed in multiple dimensions. As late as 1807, Hubert Vautrin observed of the Polish lands that ” the slave toils for the master from dawn till dusk.” Nightfall did not necessarily signal rest or sleep; often, peasant families took to the fields during these hours to secure their survival through the harsh winter months. For the peasant class, time practically did not exist as a structured notion; days blurred into a continuous mass, with the passage of years marked solely by the rhythms of the changing seasons.
Meanwhile, the Polish and European aristocracy lived in excessive leisure, suffused with perpetual boredom. With little to meaningfully occupy their time, nobles often indulged in hosting extravagant parties or organising hunts. At times, a nobleman would commit acts of cruelty or self-righteous violence against peasants, finding in the accompanying surge of adrenaline a fleeting escape from the stifling monotony of palace and court life. This interplay of boredom and the nobility’s unchecked arbitrariness not only highlighted class divisions but also reinforced the mechanisms of power and control.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, noblewomen, increasingly eager for education and professional opportunities, sought to overcome the stifling boredom of their lives. However, unlike Jewish women who were beginning to enter universities during this period, most Catholic and Protestant aristocratic women could aspire only to graduating from teachers’ colleges. However, even these modest ambitions were quickly curtailed by their families. Women were drawn back to palaces or manor houses, where they resumed cultivating boredom while awaiting marriage.
The emergence of the labour movement marked a revolutionary shift in the organisation of time. While the economically privileged retained the freedom to manage their time as they pleased, workers’ demands, manifestos, and strikes gradually wrested away the tools that allowed the elite to arbitrarily control the schedules of the so-called lower classes. Over time, labour movements in some parts of the world managed to achieve the division of the day into periods of work and rest. However, rather than eliminating time as a marker of class divisions, this transformation merely rendered it another standardised system of measurement. In economically developed nations, this system remains firmly under the control of market forces and state regulations.
The 3s/8h theme juxtaposes two distinct units of time. The 8-hour period represents the portion of the day that, as advocated by the labour movement, is dedicated to rest and self-organisation. In contrast, 3 seconds signifies the minimum span applied to measure an audience’s engagement on social media. Today, the perception of time’s passage – and with it, the ability to manage it – has become increasingly elusive and relative. We live in an era when most citizens in Western societies have a lot of time free from professional and reproductive labour, yet experience it as perpetually scarce and insufficient.
Nowadays, time is no longer just a materially measurable and finite resource. Attention has become the fundamental unit of time measurement, serving as both a contemporary currency and a personal, neurological challenge. Following eras defined by serfdom, factory labour, and other forms of employment that tied specific tasks to the time spent on them, we now see a relationship between time and work dictated by efficiency and task completion. Simultaneously, we are immersed in an attention economy whose principles go against the everyday time-work economy.
The irregular working hours and flexible forms of employment characteristic of late capitalism foster a state of perpetual readiness and fragmented presence. The boundaries between working time and leisure time have become increasingly blurred, with both immersed in the timelessness of capitalist production. As a result, time has transformed into a personal currency – a tool for self-exploitation and a source of stress.
Historically, the concept of free time has been tied to mechanisms of community building, the preservation of traditions, and the fight for civil rights. Today, however, most citizens in Western societies have more so-called free time than ever before. Yet, this time has been redefined as a lucrative market rather than a social, political, or personal resource. As a result, it has given rise to a form of phantom time – a seemingly autonomous space that, under the guise of freedom of choice and self-determination, dissipates into distracted absorption. For instance, Netflix reports that its users spend an average of around 2 hours daily watching content, while an estimated 2-3 hours are spent on social media. Since the average engagement with social media content is often measured in seconds rather than minutes or hours, messages consumed in such fleeting moments often bypass verbalisation or even conscious awareness.
The proliferation of the Internet and social networks has drastically shortened the time needed to assimilate a single piece, while the sheer volume of recordings and albums available on streaming services now exceeds human cognitive capacity. At the same time, the mass popularity and decreasing costs of recording and archiving devices increasingly contribute to replacing listening and observation processes with machine learning, effectively ceding the field to AI. However, this rather bleak scenario is being reimagined through contemporary approaches to sound art, which emphasise the communal nature of the experience and the importance of spaces dedicated to fostering the sonic imagination.
Overstimulation has become a daily reality for most people in the modern world. Its first consequences – neurological, psychological, and social – are already well-documented, prompting the need to reconsider how genuinely free time can be understood and used. The privatisation of stress and the tendency to alleviate it through market-driven modes of relaxation often lead to a search for enduring structures that can imbue value to moments outside the logic of production. Perhaps the conservative turn, with its emphasis on nurturing established systems and relationships, is a response to the sensation of time slipping away and spilling beyond its own framework.
The theme of 3s/8h addresses, among other topics, the concept of free time and serves as a springboard for an artistic dialogue exploring issues such as people’s history, the emancipation of labour movements, the social impacts of economic transformations, and the influence of technology in shaping communities.
Leśnica, a housing estate in Wrocław with over 800 years of history, lies approximately 12 kilometres west of the city center. Originally a street village, it was annexed to Wrocław in 1928 during the city’s largest territorial expansion, when dozens of villages and two towns were incorporated. At that time, Leśnica, with a population of around 5,000 people, had been downgraded from a town to a village and was known as Deutsche Lissa.
Throughout its history, the settlement suffered significant destruction, having been burned down multiple times during invasions and battles. It was first ravaged by the Hussites, later by soldiers during the Thirty Years’ War, and finally by Napoleon Bonaparte’s army in the early 19th century. In 1945, although the front of the Battle of Breslau was passing through it, Leśnica sustained relatively little damage. From August 1942, a sub-camp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp operated there.
The castle in Leśnica was historically one of the seats of the Silesian Piast dynasty. Likely built in 1132 as a small defensive stronghold along the road to Legnica, it witnessed significant historical events, including the death of Prince Bolesław I the Tall on the night of 7–8 December 1201. After the death of Henry VI the Good in 1335, the last Duke of Wrocław, the castle and the duchy became part of the Kingdom of Bohemia. Over time, the estate passed through the hands of various noble families. Among its owners was Count Horatio di Forno, an Italian nobleman infamous for his religious fanaticism and cruelty. He was reputed to have killed 50 peasants for refusing to convert to Catholicism and to have stabbed a servant in anger over spilled wine. Local legend held that the Count’s wraith haunted the castle, influencing weather and the Bystrzyca River. His son was also rumoured to have mistreated the servants, particularly the maids.
After 1733, the castle underwent a thorough Baroque-style reconstruction. Another legend emerged about a visit by Prussian King Friedrich II, who, after his victory at the Battle of Lutynia in 1756, allegedly surprised Austrian soldiers quartered in the castle. This tale was popularised by a painting by Adolf Menzel and became part of the region’s folklore. The palace survived World War II, but a fire in the 1950s prompted its reconstruction as a community centre. Today, it houses the OPT ZAMEK Cultural Centre.
The Leśnica Palace exemplifies Silesian architecture, evolving from a medieval residence to a Renaissance manor house and finally into a grand Baroque palace. The estate is surrounded by 17th-century bastion fortifications with casemates. At the turn of the millennium, one of the town’s largest discotheques functioned in these spaces.
23rd Art Review Survival
3s/8h
18–22 June 2025 (Wednesday–Sunday)
former Forty Club and Castle in Leśnica
Plac Świętojański 1
54-017 Wrocław
Admission free
Opening hours:
12:00 PM – 12:00 AM on Wednesday
12:00 PM – 10:00 PM on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
curatorial team: Michał Bieniek, Daniel Brożek, Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz, Ewa Pluta
organizer: Art Transparent Foundation / www.arttransparent.org
general partner: OPT Zamek
