Cultural Scholarship Program
Exercising Modernity also includes a cultural scholarship program. These scholarships are offered to young artists and members of the academic community who have participated in the Exercising Modernity Academy. The products of the scholarship program include a variety of artistic projects and scholarly articles. All projects have an interdisciplinary character and a connection with numerous branches of art, ranging from architecture to film.
Scholarship Program 2025
The fifth edition of the Exercising Modernity Academy was dedicated to the processes of shaping societies under conditions of changing borders. Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century experienced wars, migrations and social transformations that affected demographic structures, mental maps of the region and phantom borders. These issues take on new significance in the context of the war in Ukraine, which has once again forced millions to migrate.
The modernisation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, linked to industrial development, urbanisation and the struggle for independence, built new identities, often reinforcing nationalism but also excluding minorities and their traditions. The legacy of the transformation of the 20th century can be seen today in the processes of globalisation and European integration, which are shaping new models of community.
During the Academy, we considered how architecture, literature, art or theatre influenced the construction of identity. What traces have been left by past transformations? How do societies deal with unwanted heritage and how do they avoid conflicts in their reinterpretation? We also considered whether forced modernisation always leads to dreams of prosperity and peace.
Organiser: Pilecki Institute Berlin Branch
Partners: Adam Mickiewicz Institute
Scholarship Holders 2025
The competition selected four successful candidates, who have six months to work on their original projects, focused on the subject of modernity analysed in the context of 20th century Polish and/or Eastern European history, art and/or culture with additional reference to German or Israel.
The Exercising Modernity Cultural Scholarship in 2025 was granted to:
Shani Tamari-Matan
Reinventing Folk Dance Traditions in Modern Spaces
Between 1925 and 1940, a remarkable cultural transformation took place as four women from Eastern Europe arrived in Palestine with a mission to create a new dance tradition. These women – Rivka Sturman, Gertrude Kraus, Tirza Hodes, and Gurit Kadman – would become the architects of Hebrew folk dance, carrying their European modernist training into a radically different cultural and physical landscape. “Here we have to start over. New! Not what we learned abroad,” declared Sturman upon arriving from Leipzig, encapsulating the tension between preservation and reinvention that would define their work through the years.
This research-creation project investigates how modernist movement traditions migrate across changing borders, transform under new social conditions, and become archived as cultural heritage. Through a cyclical process of archive-performance-archive, the project will investigate how these women’s European dance background – influenced by German expressionism, the Wandervogel youth movement, and Rudolf von Laban’s movement choirs – was translated into a new cultural context that aimed to serve both nation-building and socialist community-making.
The project’s choreographic investigation focuses on five specific archival “movement capsules” from archives in Israel, ranging from the 1944 Gertrude Kraus’s expressionist dance to innovative radio dance instructions of the 1960s. Through contemporary choreographic responses to these materials, Archive in Motion will explore how cultural heritage can be simultaneously preserved and activated, challenging traditional notions of authenticity while examining how borders – both geographical and cultural – shape the evolution of movement traditions.
The question of location has emerged as one of this project’s central concerns. While traditionally these folk dances were performed outdoors or on temporary stages, suggesting they could exist anywhere as they ‘come from the people, to the people,’ my project proposes a specific geographical journey. I intend to trace these dances from Israel to Europe and back again, creating a cyclical movement that mirrors the original migration patterns of the early 20th century, but with an additional layer of return. Using maps as a choreographic tool, will offer a unique approach to structured moves and landmarks, both symbolic and concrete. This journey will inevitably raise acute questions about location, territory, and borders, pushing the project into unexplored territories.
Photographer: Yael Shmidt
Photographer: Amit Man
Biographical note:
Shani Tamari-Matan is an Israeli dancer, lecturer, and dance researcher whose work bridges choreographic practice and theory, with recent focus on the intersection of history, archive, and dance. As a contemporary dancer, she has contributed to numerous projects while also serving as creator, dramaturg, and rehearsal director. Her academic courses at The Academy of Music and Dance and The School of Visual Theater in Jerusalem – institutions where she completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees – explore the connections between dance history, performance practice, and archival documentation. Tamari-Matan’s research methodology uniquely integrates physical experience with scholarly inquiry. Her work has been recognized through diverse awards including the President Scholarship for Doctoral Studies in Folklore and Folk Culture Studies at The Hebrew University (2025), the Badihi Foundation grant for Jews of Yemen Research (2023), and the Minister of Culture Award for dance performance (2020).
Anna Helena Przybyła
(Un)realized Utopia: Culture and Recreation Parks in Poland
Culture parks (also known as culture and recreation parks, culture and leisure parks, or people’s parks) began to emerge in Poland after World War II. The first projects were implemented during the era of Socialist Realism, though both design and construction work continued even after the political thaw. The concept of the culture and recreation park originated in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s as a response to the public parks that had appeared in European cities since the 19th century. These parks were intended not only for mass recreation but also to offer cultural, political, and sporting programs. Designed with a broad audience in mind, they were seen as spaces suitable for organizing festivals and parades, and such events required an appropriate architectural setting.
In the mid-1950s, such parks were designed and built in several provincial capitals and major industrial centers throughout Poland. The most fully realized and largest example is the current Silesian Park (Katowice/Chorzów). Central Park of Culture in Warsaw was significantly downsized following the political thaw and subsequent revision of plans. In most projects from this period, grand and monumental visions gave way to much more modest implementations. The final results often did not reflect the designers’ original intentions, and the parks ultimately failed to meet the formal or functional criteria of cultural and recreational parks. Today, many of these parks are neglected or abandoned, and the few completed facilities are often damaged or destroyed.
This contrast between the monumental scale of the parks (including sculptures, architectural, and urban details) and their current condition serves as the starting point for this project.
The aim of the project is to examine the nature of these planned and designed park complexes and to analyze the narratives about them in magazines, newsreels, and state documents. The research will include an analysis of architectural designs, the identification of completed elements, an assessment of their current condition and subsequent transformations, as well as an examination of how these spaces are currently used by contemporary visitors.
The research will be supplemented by field visits and artistic explorations of today’s parks—experiencing these places firsthand and through painterly sketches. The final outcome of the project will be a series of collages, architectural fantasies, and creative reinterpretations of selected cultural parks.
phot. Anna Przybyła’s materials
A postcard from Dąbrowa Górnicza. Archives of Anna Przybyła
Biographical note:
Anna Helena Przybyła – (born 1994) architect, architectural researcher, and educator. She graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology (2022) and studied Art History at the Faculty of Management of Visual Culture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (2017–2020). Currently, she is a teaching and research assistant at the Department of Architectural and Art Heritage at the Faculty of Architecture, Warsaw University of Technology. As a PhD candidate at the Doctoral School of the Warsaw University of Technology, she is working on her dissertation on Parks of Culture and Recreation in Poland. She serves as the secretary of the academic journal Kwartalnik Architektury i Urbanistyki (Architecture and Town Planning Quarterly) and collaborates with the architectural quarterly Rzut. In 2025, she was a fellow of the “Exercising Modernity” program organized by the Pilecki Institute in Berlin. She was also awarded the 2nd Honorary Prize in the 2023/24 “Theory” competition with “Architecture Writing Workshops,” organized by the Stefan Kuryłowicz Foundation, for her essay titled “Blok i hektar nieba” (A Block and a Hectare of Sky) about a village in the former State Agricultural Farm (PGR) Szklary. She conducts workshops and classes for children and youth on art, architecture, and urbanism. Her research interests focus on post-war art and architecture, particularly the relationship between architecture and power, utopian architectural concepts, and the post-WWII reconstruction and development of Polish cities and rural areas.