Tadeusz Kantor: The Only Way

Four parts to the programme

Opening and Conversation

At the wall's first activation on 11 SEP, Çağla İlk and other participating artists discuss Tadeusz Kantor's understanding of theatre—publicness, archive, and how historical material finds its way into work made now.

On the Wall

Eustachy Kossakowski's photograph of the ›Panoramic Sea Happening‹ goes up on the wall. Blown up and placed in public space, the archival image shifts—no longer just a historical record, but a present scene, where the theater meets the street, the city, and whoever happens to be passing.

Performative Interpretations

Bogdan Renczyński, longtime member of Kantor's Theatre Cricot 2 and performer in many of his productions, has gathered texts, memories, and material from Kantor's practice. This becomes the raw material for new work with members of the Gorki ensemble, circling questions at the heart of Kantor's own practice: How do figures, images, and memories find their way back to the stage? How does the past become present without being rebuilt as history? What place do repetition, absence, chance, and personal memory hold in theater?

The performative works show on 11, 12, and 13 SEP with further repeat performances throughout the run.

Film Screening

The day's programme closes at 9pm with a screening of ›Kantor ist da‹ (›Kantor Is Here‹), a film made in Munich by Günter Mahlow—another way into Kantor's work, alongside the photographic, textual, and performative material.

The 11 SEP activation runs alongside the Sarkis exhibition, opening at the Gorki Theater on 4 SEP 2026, and open that day from 1—9pm. The two projects speak to each other: Kantor's ideas of memory, recurrence, and the presence of past images meet Sarkis's sense of his own artworks as recurring protagonists in an ongoing theater.

Tadeusz Kantor

Tadeusz Kantor—born 1915 in Wielopole Skrzyńskie, died 1990 in Kraków—was a director, set designer, artist, and theorist. In 1955, he founded the experimental theatre collective Cricot 2, and gained international recognition above all through his ›Theater of Death‹ and productions like ›The Dead Class,‹ ›Wielopole, Wielopole,‹ and ›Today Is My Birthday.‹ As a visual artist, he showed at documenta II and documenta 6. Across his work, he wove theater, painting, object art, happening, memory, and personal history into a practice all his own.