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 Przybyła
Parks of Culture (also called parks of culture and leisure, parks of culture and recreation, or people’s parks) began to emerge in Poland after World War II. The first projects were implemented during the period of Socialist Realism, but both design and construction continued beyond the political thaw. The concept of the park of culture and recreation originated in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s as a response to 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 sports programming. Designed for a mass audience, they were envisioned as spaces suitable for festivals and parades—events that required an appropriate architectural setting.
By the mid-1950s, such parks were being designed and built in several provincial capitals and major industrial centers across Poland. The most fully realized and largest example is what is now known as Silesian Park. The Central Park of Culture in Warsaw, however, was significantly scaled down after the political thaw and subsequent revision of plans. In most projects from this period, grand and monumental visions gave way to much more modest executions. The final results often failed to reflect the designers’ original intentions, and the parks ultimately did not meet the formal or functional criteria of true cultural and recreational spaces. Today, many of these parks are neglected or abandoned, with the few completed structures often damaged or destroyed.
This contrast between the visionary 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 investigate the nature of these planned and designed park complexes and examine the narratives surrounding them in periodicals, Film Chronicles, and state documents. The research will include analysis of architectural designs, identification of completed elements, assessment of their current condition and subsequent transformations, as well as an exploration of how these spaces are used today by contemporary visitors.
The research will be complemented by site visits and artistic explorations of today’s parks—experiencing these places in person and through painting. The project will ultimately result in a series of collages, architectural fantasies, and creative reinterpretations of selected parks of culture.
phot. Anna Przybyła’s materials
A postcard from Dąbrowa Górnicza. Archives of Anna Przybyła
Biographical note:
She is a graduate of Architecture and Urban Planning at the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology (2014-2018), History of Art at the Faculty of Visual Culture Management at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw with a specialisation in Culture of Places (2017-2020) and Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology with a specialisation in Architectural Heritage (2020-2022). Since October 2024, she has been a student at the Doctoral School of the Warsaw University of Technology. The topic of her dissertation: ‘Common Dreams for a better city. Parks of Culture and Leisure in Poland’ on the subject of large-scale public green areas designed and implemented in Poland during the Socialist Realist period.
Since 2020, she has been the secretary of the scientific journal ‘Kwartalnik Architektury i Urbanistyki’. Since February 2023, she has been working as a research and teaching assistant in the Department of Architectural Heritage and Art at the Faculty of Architecture, Warsaw University of Technology. She teaches the courses: History of Art, Typological Analyses in Architecture, Modern Tendencies in Architecture and Methodology of Scientific Work. She also teaches – individually or as part of the ‘Archi-Interesting’ collective (Archi-ciekawe) – original workshops and courses for children, teenagers and adults. So far, she has cooperated, for example, with the Wolski Cultural Centre in Warsaw, the Children’s University Foundation, and the Academic Association of the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology.
She is interested in post-war art and architecture, especially the relationship between architecture and politics, the reconstruction and construction of Polish cities after World War II, utopian and dystopian architectural concepts. Her interests are also reflected in her thesis topics, scholarly activities, publications and ongoing research. In 2019, she published an article, „Okazały, największy i jedyny w swoim rodzaju”. Dom Chłopa w Warszawie (‘The magnificent, largest and only one of its kind. The Peasant’s House in Warsaw), in the academic yearbook ‘Miescher’ (co-authored with Adam Parol) on one of the most important buildings of the time of the political thaw in Warsaw, a symbol of the modernisation of the Polish countryside and the worker-peasant union.