on 22 May this year, the ‘Gallery in the Gallery’ project – a joint initiative of iPoster and the National Museum in Warsaw – was inaugurated at the Promenada Shopping Centre. The event featured the premiere of the first digital show in the series, entitled ‘Self-Portraits. “Self-portraits. Let’s meet at the museum’, presenting selected works from the museum’s collections. Over the next month, they will be available to view on all digital media in the Promenada Shopping Mall. Now everyday shopping can be the start of an encounter with art.
Shopping centres have long ceased to be just a place for shopping – they are increasingly becoming a space for meetings, inspiration and new experiences. CH Promenada is consciously following this path, consistently developing its own vision of a place where art becomes an integral part of everyday life. To this end, among other things, in October this year it opened Promenada Art Space, a place dedicated to creating immersive visual experiences and a platform for unique art projects – one of which is an exhibition of Victoria Fard’s work that has been on display in the arcade since March this year. Now, iPoster, the National Museum in Warsaw and the Promenada Shopping Mall have organised an event to inaugurate the ‘Gallery in a Gallery’ project. As part of it, selected works from the MNW collection are presented on digital media placed in the centre’s space.
Art in a new context
“Gallery in the Gallery” is a project initiated by iPoster, owner and operator of the largest network of DOOH media in shopping malls in Poland, implemented in collaboration with the National Museum in Warsaw, one of the oldest and most important cultural institutions in the country. Within its framework, until the end of 2025, selected works of art from the museum’s collection will be presented on iPoster digital screens in shopping malls, and visitors to the centre will be able to benefit from a discount when purchasing a ticket to the Museum.
– We are very pleased to participate in this project. It is an opportunity for the Museum to reach new audiences and for visitors to the shopping malls to interact with art. Of course, nothing can replace personal contact with a work of art, so we hope to encourage as many people as possible to visit the National Museum in Warsaw. Once they have visited us once, they will certainly come back ,” adds Małgorzata Borkowska, MNW Deputy Director for Communication and Education.
Promenade as first stop
It was at the Promenade that the ‘Gallery in the Gallery’ project was officially inaugurated and its first instalment premiered – a digital show entitled ‘Self-portraits. Let’s meet at the museum’. It presents a selection of artists’ self-portraits, which are held on a daily basis in the collections of the National Museum in Warsaw – in the Medieval Art Gallery, Early Art Gallery, Nineteenth-Century Art Gallery and the Digital MNW. The works on display include self-portraits by Joos van Cleve, Bartholomeus van der Helst, Wiktoria Goryńska, Tadeusz Pruszkowski, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and Anna Bilińska. Each of the paintings is accompanied by brief, interesting information that allows one to look at the work from a new perspective – to understand it better and see the context, which is often not visible at first glance.
The inauguration of the project was attended by representatives of iPoster and MNW, and the works presented in the show were talked about by Tomasz Jeziorowski – art historian, curator, head of the painting warehouse in the MNW Collection of Contemporary Art, lecturer in art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and co-founder of the Gallery of 20th and 21st Century Art in MNW.
Data shows that shopping malls are visited by the vast majority of Poles – as opposed to museums and art galleries. A survey commissioned by iPoster shows that as many as 37 per cent of respondents have not been to a museum even once in the past year, and 32 per cent do not visit such places at all. Meanwhile, only 7 per cent of Poles generally do not use the offer of shopping centres.
“Gallery in Gallery” is an example of how modern technology can support culture and make it more accessible. As a next-generation shopping centre, Promenada shows that shopping, entertainment and education can coexist in one coherent space. The exhibitions will be changed periodically until the end of 2025.
The Promenade invites all art lovers – whether seasoned museum-goers or those who are just discovering the beauty of art – to participate in this unique digital encounter with culture.
For more information on the centre’s current offerings, please visit: https://warszawa.promenada.com/aktualnosci/.
source: press materials
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At the end of March, an audiovisual exhibition by Victoria Fard, an acclaimed digital and generative artist, opened at the Promenada Shopping Centre. We wrote about it HERE.
