Agnieszka Pindera

Polish curator and art theorist. She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century art.

She is a graduate of Cultural Studies at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, and completed postgraduate studies in Gender Studies and Curatorial Museum Studies at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She is currently preparing her doctoral dissertation at the Doctoral School of Humanities at University of Warsaw.

Since December 2024, she has served as Director of Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. From 2016 to 2023, she was affiliated with Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, where she headed the Museology Center and curated exhibitions including “Palace” by Jasmina Cibic and “Peer-to-Peer: Collective Practices in New Art”. She co-authored the interdisciplinary project “Avant-Garde Museum” with Jarosław Suchan, which received an award in the research category of the 42nd Sybilla Museum Event of the Year competition (2021). She has also worked at the Museum of Warsaw, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture, and the Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Toruń.

She co-curated Konrad Smoleński’s exhibition in the Polish Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, together with Daniel Muzyczuk. She is the author of the book “Patkowski: Ambassador of Music from Mars” (2019). Other editorial projects she has co-produced include “The 1982 Cultural Exchange Between Łódź and Los Angeles” (2024) and “Please, Keep Talking. A Social History of the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź” (2022).

She is a member of AICA Poland and CIMAM.

When the Exhibition Ends: Curatorial Learning and Institutional Unlearning

What happens when an exhibition about institutional imagination is overtaken by institutional reality? Although The Avant-Garde Museum was not intended to answer such a question, it suddenly found itself at the epicentre of institutional change. Conceived as a project reconstructing the artistic autonomy of the 1920s through the self-institutionalization of the avant-garde, the exhibition ended in a radically different institutional reality: a right-wing takeover of the museum. As a curator, I faced the challenge of reconstructing and arguing for the logic of artist-led administration in the 1920s while criticizing a seemingly analogous process in the 2020s. The paper uses this collision between historical reconstruction and contemporary institutional change to examine the limits of curatorial learning. By reflecting on the afterlife of The Avant-Garde Museum, I propose the notion of institutional unlearning as a way of describing the rupture between curatorial knowledge and institutional practice.