A vibrant intermediary between FestivALT and greater Kraków, Info Budka is a hub based in Plac Nowy, providing passersby and participants with information about FestivALT and its events.
An installation of sculptural works by Stephania Freda Leigh, “Their Breasts, My Breasts” explores the sexual trauma inflicted upon women during the Holocaust.
A woman of many photographs and one great gesture. When Amalia Krieger and her brother Natan inherited Ignacy Krieger’s photography studio, they decided to keep signing photographs with their famous father’s name. We know about what she did, we know about the way she worked. As for her thoughts and ideas—we will try to access them through her photography.
Jason Francisco’s photo-text-installation work examines a part of the Auschwitz story all but erased from public memory, through a deliberate misuse of the historical practice of stereoscopy.
Di Libe brent wi a nase Szmate (“Love Burns like a Wet Rag”) returns to FestivALT for a Shabbat evening of music, stories, and food.
Cultural anthropologist Erica Lehrer will lead a tour of the permanent exhibition of the Ethnographic Museum, focusing on the artefacts (as well as the absences) related to Jews and Jewish culture. What do these objects say about non-Jewish Polish conceptions of Jews and Jewishness? How should “folk” culture about and by Jews be displayed in this kind of museum?
For three years, Dr. Roma Sendyka, Dr. Erica Lehrer, curator Magdalena Zych, and photographer Wojciech Wilczyk have researched representations of the Holocaust in Polish folk art. Join the curators for a presentation about these uncanny, baffling, and at times deeply empathic works of art.
Confronting challenges of identity, memory, translation, and place, Michelle Levy and Patrycja Dołowy will perform their experience in conversation, between passionate search and profound discovery. Having followed Paulina’s story across Poland and Ukraine, the two women will summon archives, personal travel footage, maps, oral histories, foliage, pieces of the earth, speculation, and reflections, as tangible means to share what is truly ungraspable.
Lucky Jew takes a common object of Polish folk culture and turns it on its head. This performance, at once sincere and satirical, is our most well-known and most controversial piece.
23.06, 7:00–12:00, Hala Targowa
26.06, 10:30–13:00, Plac Nowy
30.06, 7:00–12:00, Hala Targowa
Ten pages of a Holocaust witness testimony taken in Kraków in 1945 were all that appeared to exist of Paulina Hirsch. This exploratory walk investigates sites connected to her story.
The Long Table is a situational dinner party, and conversation is what’s on the menu.
Two of FestivALT’s co-directors, Adam Schorin and Jason Francisco, lead tours of the site of the Nazi concentration camp Płaszów.
On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. How many shall pass on, how many shall come to be? On Erev Yom Kippur, a young woman talks with her great-grandmother about her Jewish family’s past and future, about building a new queer family without betraying her history.
A panel discussion about the current use of the Chevra Tehilim prayerhouse.
Women on Women is an evening of sharp, often irreverent performances that question fixed understandings of Jewishness and gender, religion and sexuality, entirely through a female lens. This year’s edition features Warsaw-based painter Marta Malinowska, New Orleans-based burlesque artist, Angie G, and Krakow-based furrier Marta Horowitz. The evening is hosted by the famous burlesque artist Betty Q and will revolve around themes of games and play.
Join FestivALT and MEK Director Antoni Bartosz for a candid conversation about the museum’s collection of objects related to Jews and the museum’s responsibility to represent Poland’s multiethnic history in general. What should be expected of an institution that uses the slogan “My museum, a museum about me”? On this day you can visit the Museum for free – just say “FestivALT” at the counter.
Join the FestivALT co-directors and creators of Lucky Jew for a discussion about the project, its problems and merits, and the conversation that has grown around it.
The debate about the origins of hummus is a long and controversial one: nearly every country and ethnic group in the Middle East has made a claim to be its primary inventors, and buying or selling the food can quickly become a political statement. This debate has not left Kraków unscathed: while in much of the city, hummus is primarily sold as a product of the Arab world, in Kazimierz, it’s typically treated as a Jewish Israeli foodstuff. For this inaugural event of FestivALT Nights, join Bart and Kasia, owners of Hummus Amamamusi and makers of self-described “Polish hummus,” for an evening that will change everything you think you know about a little legume called the chickpea.
Part theatrical production and part legal intervention, Justice is a unique performance that investigates the possibility of holding accountable the people responsible for the expulsion of Jews from Poland in 1968. For FestivALT 2019, internationally acclaimed director Michał Zadara is performing a one-man version of the piece. After the show, Zadara will stay for a talkback with the audience.
Fifteen years ago, a young Polish-Canadian filmmaker Eric Bednarski obtained an amateur 8mm film, 10 minutes’ footage of the life inside the Warsaw Ghetto, under the German occupation of the city during World War II. Inspired by this footage, Eric created a movie that combines the 10 minutes from the Warsaw Ghetto with survivor testimony, interviews with architects and urban historians about the reconstruction of Warsaw, and research into the Nazis’ unrealized plans for post-war Warsaw.
FestivALT 2019 artists Stephania Freda Leigh (Their Breasts, My Breasts), Betty Q (Madame Q’s) and Zofia Noworól (What Does Kazimierz Dream About?) come together for a public discussion about their three FestivALT projects and their uniquely individual approaches to the investigation of the female body through art.
Jews! Jews! Jews! is a Berlin-based minori-tease cabaret that was started in 2018 by Jewish-American artists Lolita Va Voom and Nana Schewitz. In their quest to “re-Jew” Germany, these two cabaret artists book shows featuring exclusively Jewish and minority artists
In English and Polish
Legendary Polish Jewish burlesque performer and activist Betty Q has transported Madame Q, the Warsaw club and studio she co-owns, to Kraków for an evening of fun, conversation, and burlesque.
namesake is an experimental film by Eliza Levinson that explores the legacy of diaspora, migration, and “postmemory”—how memory is embodied and transmitted over generations.
Zofia Noworól, a choreographer and yogi, and her partner Mateusz Ostrowski, a process-oriented psychotherapist, present a different experience of Jewish Kraków.
Ethnobotanist Karol Szurdak is hosting a workshop on infusions, teas, and lotions that we’ll make from plants and herbs gathered from the site of KL Płaszów.
Composer/guitarist Alex Roth relocated from London to Kraków last year, reversing a migratory path traced by his great-great-grandfather in 1890. Weaving improvisations around his own field recordings, this multi-part promenade performance explores tensions between documented and experienced memory, unfolding across four sites of special significance to Kraków’s Jewish community.
At first glance, Krakow’s district of Kazimierz feels like a paradise of trendy bars, cute cafes and classy restaurants set among the remnants of the city’s Jewish past. But there’s also an obscure Jewish Kazimierz, full of magnificent and tragic history, as well as a present complicated by gentrification, mass tourism and questionable representations of Jewish culture. FestivALT, a local Jewish arts collective, takes you on a unique, critically-minded tour in a golf cart that will open the door to exploring the tensions, nuances, and cultural confusion of contemporary Kazimierz.