Threshold Works No.17 is a multichannel work and permanent collection acquisition for MNK - the piece follows on directly from SPECTRES an installation commissioned in 2019 by SHAPE platform, UHFest & MUTO gallery Budapest and released as one of 3 albums in the triple album / 3CD set "Beyond Enclosures"

Threshold Works No.17 opens a literal window onto Krakow through the distinct architectures of multiple MNK branches, these buildings become a lens through which the city’s exterior is re-presented as an audio projection onto the interior architecture of this exhibition’s location: reframing inside and outside, turning the architectural environment in on itself. Through a specific use of sound, the resonant volumes of the MNK’s Czartoryski Museum, Sukiennice, Josef Czapski Museum, Hotel Cracovia and Bishop Erazm Ciolek Palace are employed as a filter of the urban fabric, palpably rendering how and where these buildings are located within Krakow alongside their contemporary geographical and social context. To create this audio composition, in a room in each building, the air is brought into motion across the threshold of an open window using two specifically tuned sine-tone generators. This draws in the air from outside and with it contemporary society breathes back into the buildings, this oscillating movement additionally creating an audible ‘flutter’. This movement of air is heard amid the city’s tourist flows and visitations, the arterial transportation of goods and commuters, the audible intrusions of historic sounds, the making and unmaking of the natural and built environment, the incursion of fauna, flora and the seasons - the sounds in the recordings, the layers comprising the 40 minute composition, present together a ventilation of the zeitgeist. This intimate, breathing portrait of architecture and the social fabric which forms and moves around it frames the buildings as porous and transparent entities, opening them to the flow of air - the conduit upon which sound travels – and within which the people, their sound and activities are borne into these buildings, shaping the exhibition’s sonic environment in the same way they shape the city’s physical and architectural environments.

SECTIONS / PRZEKOJE exhibition statement: Architecture is an important part of our everyday life, shaping public space, the context of a place, even influencing the environment. It became the theme of the permanent exhibition ‘Sections. Gallery of Polish architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries’. The gallery is devoted to the history and contemporary times of Polish architecture. The ‘Sections’ nature of the presentation, to which the exhibition title refers, relates both to historical or formal transformations, as well as to the functional diversity of the presented objects, allowing to see the importance of architecture in designing various areas of everyday life. The exhibition is divided into six sections corresponding to six themes. They are: Composition, Nature, Technology, Manifesto, Time and Space and Cost. These concepts are meant to act as signposts for the public in their wanderings through the history of Polish architecture, as well as to broaden the area of reflection to include the perspective of trans-regional and timeless questions. Among the problems discussed at the exhibition will be such issues as: housing, common spaces, social responsibility of architecture or new urban solutions, i.e. still current issues for architectural activity, with significant consequences for our everyday life. Apart from models presenting selected realisations, the exhibition includes projects, photographs and multimedia materials. The Gallery, located on the second floor of a nineteenth-century bourgeois tenement house, is a prelude to the future activities of the new branch of the National Museum in Krakow, located in the former Cracovia Hotel.

Exhibition Curators: Weronika Grzesiak, Malgorzata Jedrzejczyk, Kacper Kepinski
Project coordinator: Katarzyna Pawlowska
Arrangement design: Agnieszka Szultk Dreamandart