COLLECTION

The art collection at the Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu (CoCA) could be compared to a living organism. It is constantly developing and growing. The number of elements it consists of increases year by year, slowly filling the underground art repository which houses it.

Works from CoCA’s collection can be viewed at numerous exhibitions: both those organised in the same building, where they are mainly used by the curators as part of the exhibitions they organise, and those where they are displayed on loan outside CoCA. The collection is on permanent display in the Gallery of the CoCA collection on the ground floor. Here, every three weeks, new items from the collection are selected for display by its custodian to be seen alongside a screen showing a video work. Each time, both are described in more depth on our website.

SETS

The collection features extremely diverse objects, from classical stone sculptures which are very heavy and difficult to move from the repository, to works stored purely as designs, and which thus do not actually exist. They are created as per the needs of an exhibition, but their atypical materials or dimensions make them impossible to store in the repository. Some works can even be harmful to their keepers! These are items which are constantly “alive”.

We have been developing our collection since 2007. It mainly includes works bought as part of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage’s Regional contemporary art collections programme (“Kolekcje – Regionalne kolekcje sztuki współczesnej”), which began in 2012, and the National Cultural Programme “Signs of the time” (2007–2008). The collection is being built with the support of the City of Toruń and the Marshal of the Kujawsko-Pomorskie province.  Many of the works in the collection were gifted by artists. Some displayed items did not exist before being exhibited at CoCA and were created or reconstructed by the institution’s employees – such works are also sometimes added to the collection.

BLOG  

The blog we are putting online today is a place to talk to you about CoCA’s Toruń collection. We want it to be a place where we bring our readers closer to items which can not always be viewed, but which deserve special attention for their artistic value or for other reasons. Some posts will provide information about where the collection is currently being exhibited, how it is transported, how it is stored, and even how some of the works are restored.

We hope that the blog will be somewhere you can return to regularly!

Tags: blog, collection