Artists: Bahaleen (PS), Border Emergency Collective (PL), Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich (UK/BY), fantastic little splash (UA), Martyna Marciniak (PL), Oleksiy Radynski (UA), Firas Shekhadeh (PS), Tytus Szabelski-Różniak (PL), Filip Wesołowski (PL)
Curators: Bartosz Frąckowiak, Ewa Kozik, Paweł Wodziński / Fundacja Biennale Warszawa (_BW_Lab)
Communication: Marta Bogacz, Xénia Oszvald
Production coordinator: Rita Kálmán
Production: OFF-Biennále Budapest & Fundacja Biennale Warszawa (_BW_Lab)
Address: Margit körút 5/A (District 2), Budapest
Openning: 8 May, 17:00
Opening hours: 9 May – 15 June 2025
• Wednesday: 16:00–19:00
• Thursday–Friday: 16:00–20:00
• Saturday–Sunday: 10:00–16:00
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The exhibition Granice bezpieczeństwa | Biztonsági határok | Security / Borders critically explores the concept of security through the lens of technology, featuring works situated at the intersection of contemporary art, politics, and society. While security infrastructures are often presented as protective, the exhibition highlights how they can also operate as instruments of control—reinforcing authoritarian tendencies even within democratic systems.
The project, curated by the Biennale Warszawa Foundation (_BW_Lab) team, investigates how narratives of safety and protection are used to amplify societal fear, justify surveillance, and restrict civil liberties. Through diverse artistic practices, the exhibition reflects on pressing questions around borders, technological development, public order, and the future of security.
The exhibition investigates how security discourse and policies become tools to coerce social consent for expanding regimes of control and surveillance, implemented through increasingly ubiquitous infrastructures and technologies. The project focuses on areas such as: border and territorial protection, public order and domestic politics, armed conflicts and wars, critical infrastructure and digital threats, the connections between security and technological development.
Most of the works on display are recent – either commissioned specifically for the exhibition, or supplemented with current data – forensic and postforensic works that analyse the development of digital surveillance and manipulation technologies, and uncover the role of the powers these tools serve. Focusing on geographic areas such as Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, Russia, Poland and Belarus, or the Middle East, primarily Palestine, Jordan and Syria, the works show the progressive radicalisation of methods used by increasingly authoritarian powers. In this new planetary order, increasing technological capabilities are leading to escalating armed conflicts, wars or acts of genocide.
The exhibition Granice bezpieczeństwa | Biztonsági határok | Security / Borders brings to light the fact that security is not a universal value, given to all equally, but primarily a tool and ideology of domination and segregation, and prompts both the question of the limits of our acceptance of this state of affairs and key questions about the future: How will security-related practices evolve? What role will technologies play in them? Is it possible to harness the potential of technology to build security systems that genuinely protect civil rights and freedoms rather than restrict them?
The exhibition is a collaborative project between OFF-Biennale Budapest and the Biennale Warszawa Foundation (_BW_Lab) and it is presented within the framework of the 2025 edition of OFF-Biennale Budapest, following a long-standing collaboration between the both organisations.
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This project is co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland from the Culture Promotion Fund.
