Edition 7
The 7th edition of the Starak Family Foundation's “Wena” Grant Program Competition for the 2025/2026 school year - for an educational and artistic project entitled. “Things we do with art”.
Continuing its initiative to support the development of art education at the high school level, the Starak Family Foundation's “Wena” Grant Program in the next edition of the Competition encourages students and teachers to reflect on the very nature of art, its application and use.
As patron of this year's edition of the “Wena” Grant Program Competition, we point to Wanda Golkowska (1925-2013), an artist who spent her entire life searching for the right form and function of art. She never rested on her laurels, always trying new things. From abstraction and matter painting, through spatial compositions with moving elements that changed over time, to research on language and the relationship between words and images. As the artist's work teaches us, these explorations are never finished, they can lead us into the unknown, towards new sometimes exciting discoveries. Golkowska once noted in her notebook: “Artist + creativity = open system.”
A duality resounds in our proposed theme for the competition, “Things we do with art.”
On the one hand, we are interested in what can be done with art, i.e. its applications. We use art to talk about inner experiences, to evoke the past, to foster values, to commemorate events, to imagine the world that comes after us, and sometimes to express our disagreement. Art can also have a purely aesthetic role, and this is most often what is expected of it. Another reading of the title, leads us to question the very definition of art and its characteristics. Doing things with art, in this case, can mean performing various activities and producing objects so that they contain an artistic element.
How do we imbue our everyday lives with art, do things in an artistic spirit, fill them with creative imagination?
So we look for projects that talk about the role of art and what it can be used for. On the other hand, we are looking for the indefinable, invisible substance of art that we can imbue our lives with. The first question concerns ‘high art’, museums and galleries, the canon, heritage and tradition, while the second concerns our everyday lives, home, school, relationships with friends and loved ones. The two areas are not necessarily separate; on the contrary, we can draw on the resources of art history in our everyday lives.
We are convinced that the search for the answer to the competition task will lead you to interesting, cognitive and competence-developing artistic creations.
We warmly invite you to participate in the competition!
→ Partners of the 7th edition of the ‘Wena’ Grant Programme Competition
