22nd Mózg Festival - Bydgoszcz

22nd Mózg Festival - TIME

The theme TIME inaugurates a new three-year curatorial cycle of the Mózg Festival devoted to three fundamental dimensions of contemporary experience: TIME (2026), SPACE (2027), and REALITY (2028). In this year’s edition, time is not merely a theme - it is a medium, a process, and an experience. We are interested in time as lived through the body, memory, and attention; the time of music and improvisation; the time of ritual, creation, and transformation. Each part of the festival approaches these questions from a different perspective, together forming a shared reflection on time. 

For this reason, the 22nd Mózg Festival has been conceived as an event unfolding over several months. It consists of three interconnected acts. 

• ACT I - Sand Mandala Ceremony 10–15 August 2026 | Mózg Club. The festival opens with the creation of a Tibetan sand mandala led by Khenpo Shedup Mipham Lama and monks from Dorje Drak Monastery in Shimla, India. Over six days, visitors will be able to observe the making of the mandala and participate, at scheduled times, in meditation sessions accompanying the ceremony. The emerging mandala becomes an experience of time understood as attentiveness, patience, and a process of continual becoming, while its ritual dissolution serves as a reminder of the impermanence of all phenomena. 
• ACT II - Time is Being, Being is Time: Internal Time and the Art of Bożenna Biskupska 12 September 2026 - 7 January 2027 | Młyny Rothera Centre for Science and Culture & Współczesna Café. The second act of the festival is the most comprehensive presentation of Bożenna Biskupska’s work ever shown in Bydgoszcz. Spanning more than five decades of artistic practice, the exhibition brings together paintings, sculptures, installations, and site-specific projects. Its point of departure is time understood not as a measure of events, but as a mode of being—manifested through gesture, rhythm, materiality, and the continual transformation of the artwork. 
• ACT III - Music, Performance and Discourse 5–7 November 2026 | Młyny Rothera, the Academy of Music, and Mózg Club. The festival culminates in three days of concerts, performances, installations, exhibitions, discussions, and public talks featuring artists from Poland and abroad. The programme presents experimental, improvised, and electroacoustic music alongside interdisciplinary artistic practices, accompanied by conversations with philosophers, scientists, and artists exploring contemporary experiences and understandings of time.