Neon birds on Warsaw’s boulevards. Illuminations start today!

Neon birds will light up the glass cubbies located on Warsaw’s boulevards. This next instalment of the Vistula River Gallery of Lights will be dedicated to the winged heroes of Warsaw’s riverbanks. The light show will take place as part of the New Year’s Eve event ‘Breakthrough of the Year on the Vistula’.

This Sunday, 31 December, neon projections will be on display in glass cubbies on the boulevard next to the Museum of Modern Art on the Vistula. The installation was made by the Art2Business Foundation, commissioned by the Warsaw Greenery Board.

The installation presents four Vistula birds, which are at the same time patrons of ferries and ferry passengers between Warsaw’s shores during the summer season: Wilga, Elephant, Pliszka and Dudek.

“We invite you to take a stroll along the banks of the Vistula. The Vistula Gallery of Lights is a unique journey along the neon-lit boulevard combined with a reference to Warsaw in the 1960s and 1970s. The entire installation can be viewed free of charge around the clock” – says Magdalena Młochowska, Director Coordinator for Green Warsaw.

The neon bird installations were created from recycled materials and gifts of nature: old film, metal sheets and sand, tree branches, stones and even sunflower seeds. Some of the materials were brought by the river itself. The installation was created by artists associated with the Art2Business Foundation: Konrad Gellert and Julia Bistuła.

It was realised by Hanak Reklama, a company that draws on the legacy of Reklama, which illuminated the entire capital city during the communist era. On the Vistula River, neon signs from this studio are used by, among others, the Museum of Modern Art, the catering space at the Powiśle thermal power station and the Vistula Quarter itself.

“The opening of the exhibition is scheduled for the last day of 2023, at 8.30 pm, during the Vistula Quarter’s Breakthrough of the Year event. For the first 30 people who insert a photo of the exhibition on their social media tagged with the hashtags: #Vistula District and #ZZW souvenirs have been prepared: bird posters by Ola Jasionowska. Originally, neon signs were used in public spaces not as advertisements, but as decorations to enhance the capital after dark. This is how they became an integral part of facades and buildings. It is to this tradition that we refer in the Vistula Quarter.” – says Jan Piotrowski, Warsaw Mayor’s Plenipotentiary for the Vistula –

The luminous installations of birds are accompanied by an exhibition of archival Warsaw postcards with the capital’s neon signs. The selection of photographs for the exhibition is the responsibility of the Varsaviana Philocartists Association and the District Chamber of Architects, which, in cooperation with the Warsaw Greenery Management Board, is mounting another exhibition telling the story of Warsaw. This time, postcards capturing neon signs from the 1960s and 1970s have been selected.

Advertisements on building facades using neon signs appeared in Poland in the interwar period. It is difficult to say exactly where the first neon sign appeared in our country, but it took place in the mid-1920s. In Warsaw, it was a bottle of a certain liquor, which appeared at the intersection of Marszałkowska Street and Jerozolimskie Avenue in 1926. “The neon boom” in post-war Warsaw came in the 1960s and 1970s.

source: UM Warszawa / https://um.warszawa.pl/
photos: Jan Piotrowski / https://um.warszawa.pl/

Read also: Architecture in Poland | Neon signs | Warsaw | Curiosities | Animals | whiteMAD on Instagram