Ghosts of the Avant-Garde

Ghosts of the Avant-Garde is an artistic and research project that recalls what is missing. It examines the interrupted and unrealised trajectories of Polish avant-garde visual art and experimental film of the interwar period, treating loss not as a deficit to be repaired, but as an active historical condition. The project is developed as part of a one-year artistic scholarship of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2026).

The starting question is deliberately speculative: what might Polish avant-garde art have become if its development had not been violently disrupted by war, displacement and destruction? Instead of reconstructing what was lost, the project stays with uncertainty, absence and fragmentation, allowing them to shape both the research process and its visual outcomes.

Background and context

In the 1920s and 1930s, Polish avant-garde artists developed radical approaches to abstraction, photomontage, typography, film and spatial form. Figures such as Katarzyna Kobro, Teresa Żarnowerówna, Maria Jarema, Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, Janusz Maria Brzeski and Mojżesz Vorobeichic (Moi Ver) responded to industrialisation, urban rhythm and technological acceleration with concise, experimental visual languages.

This development was abruptly interrupted by World War II. Many works were destroyed, abandoned or never completed. Others survive only indirectly, as fragments in archives: photographs, exhibition reviews, sketches or secondary descriptions. The loss was not evenly distributed. Women artists in particular were pushed to the margins of art history, their practices more easily interrupted and less thoroughly documented.

Ghosts of the Avant-Garde emerges from this gap. It approaches history as a space shaped by what did not survive and by ideas that were never allowed to fully form.

Research focus

The project brings together several overlapping areas of inquiry:

  • lost, unfinished and undocumented works of the Polish interwar avant-garde,
  • the interrupted practices of women artists working within modernist movements,
  • speculative and counterfactual approaches to art history,
  • generative AI understood as a medium of distortion rather than reconstruction,
  • ethical and ecological constraints in digital image production,
  • non-linear and incomplete models of cultural memory.

These strands are not treated as a coherent system, but as tensions that structure the project.

Methodology and approach

The project is developed through art-based research, combining archival work, critical analysis and speculative artistic practice. I conduct research using public-domain collections from institutions such as Polona, the National Digital Archives, FINA and the Museum of Art in Łódź.

Generative AI plays a specific and limited role. I do not use to recreate lost works or to visualise how they “should have looked”. Instead, I plan to develope custom-trained models on carefully selected archival materials and employed to generate afterimages (“powidoki”): unstable, glitch-like visual propositions that remain visibly provisional.

In this context, AI functions as a way of thinking through images under conditions of historical rupture. In the project I follows the principles of my Agile Art Manifesto (2025), prioritising low-waste practices, transparency of sources, restrained production and conscious technological use. What matters is not the quantity of generated images, but the decisions surrounding their creation and circulation.

Components and outcomes

Digital installation
 An online, adaptive digital installation combining generative visuals, archival traces and critical text. Formally, it references constructivism, futurism, photomontage and geometric abstraction, while avoiding stylistic imitation or closure.

 

Bilingual publication (PL/EN)
 A digital, accessible publication documenting the project process. It includes:

  • critical essays on ghosts, afterimages and speculative historiography,
  • case studies of lost or unrealised works,
  • reflections on AI as a medium of memory and interruption,
  • conversations with historians, curators and artists.

Open AI model

A transparent, open-source generative model trained exclusively on public-domain materials, published with full documentation of sources, selection criteria and limitations.

Educational video essay
 A short bilingual video introducing the project’s key questions, artists and visual outcomes, designed for public and educational contexts.

Why it matters

As generative technologies are increasingly used to simulate, restore or complete the past, the distinction between historical knowledge and visual plausibility becomes fragile. Ghosts of the Avant-Garde resists the promise of technological repair and instead insists on the visibility of loss.

The project contributes to international discussions on AI and art by shifting attention away from innovation and efficiency toward memory, interruption and responsibility. It reintroduces Polish interwar avant-garde practices into global discourse not as a closed chapter of modernism, but as an unresolved field whose unrealised possibilities continue to shape how cultural futures are imagined.

Ministry of Culture and National Heritage Scholarship: 60 000 PLN