The system transformation of 1989 is nothing other than a new, luminous, happy Poland and everyone knows it. Yet in the midst of the joyful fiesta there are some troublemakers: the visual artists.

While some are uncorking the champagne, others are building concentration camps with Lego bricks (Libera), planting a fake palm tree in the middle of Warsaw (Rajkowska), depicting limbless male bodies (Żmijewski), or filming the death of a horse (Kozyra). They are waging a “cold war” against society, shining a light on the dark sides of the transformation – the poverty, the exclusion of those who can’t keep up, the xenophobia. They make full use of the freedom democracy provides, and on their own terms. Their critical interventions in the public space thus become the tale of a radical understanding of democracy and politics as a space of unending antagonism.

The Pyramid of Animals is a play in four parts, each of which ties in to one of the taxidermized animals from Katarzyna Kozyra’s famous and controversial sculpture of the same title. Departing from an analysis of the work itself, in which the landscape of the system change collides with a landscape of death, Michał Borczuch and dramaturg Mateusz Górniak move on to reflect on the broader impact critical art had on the society and politics of the 1990s, in which artists from Grzegorz Kowalski’s famous Smithy had a major role to play. In the following parts of the play, the artists and the actor ensemble unfold the perspective of the contemporary role of creative work. The whole thing concludes with a personal manifesto based on their own experiences: Why is art needed, and for whom?