There is a night when buildings come to life… – it seems like an introduction to a legend or a fairy tale, but it’s not. It is a description of an event that has been happening in Wroclaw each year since 2019, constantly stimulating the senses of thousands of spectators. Kinomural is an innovative event that transforms the walls of buildings into giant projection screens, merging new media art with the urban fabric. A monumental, futuristic space emerges — one that our audience explores on foot.
Wrocław | Nadodrze District | 18–19.09.2026 | FREE ENTRY
Kinomural is created at the interface of the new media art and the urban tissue. Our project realizes the site-specific idea: the projections are closely integrated with the places where they are displayed. We transform empty walls of buildings in old districts of the city into huge screens. Thus, we construct a gigantic outdoor audio-visual gallery in Wroclaw. The city’s architecture, experimental film, art in the public space, video art, cities of the future – have all inspired the creation of Kinomural, a new medium for audio-visual art.
KINOMURAL was conceived by the Bartos brothers, who have been involved in filmmaking for many years. Piotr is a director, cinematographer and artist experimenting with visual arts. Bartek is a director, screenwriter and film producer. In 2013, they founded Studio Manifiesta in Wrocław, a production studio focused on auteur cinema. The counterbalance and stabilising force behind this male duo are two women. Agata Bartos, their sister, is a graduate of the Dutch Academy of Fine Arts, a mixed-media artist, director, screenwriter and costume designer. Bringing it all together is Marianna Wasik — a producer, manager and drummer with 20 years of experience in cultural and event production, including 10 years as manager and producer of the internationally acclaimed Song of the Goat Theatre. She is also the leader and founder of the band Mamatucada.
Kinomural 2025 ODYSSEY: BETA VERSION – 21st-century mythology – between Homer and sci-fi.
The edition functioned as a single story divided into chapters, each offering a different form of narration and a different way of experiencing time.
The curatorial core of the festival consisted of two walls prepared by the Bartos brothers: AETHER OF CHAOS and HERO’S ECHO. The first led through a territory of forms, impulses, and pure perception, without a hero and without landmarks. The second evoked the figure of a wanderer and the echo of classical narrative. The next chapter of the edition was the selection RECREATIONAL DEATH curated by Peter Burr – a collection of works that treated the end as a transitional state and decay as a moment of transformation. The special guest of the festival was Yoshi Sodeoka, a pioneer of digital art, who presented two projects: SWARM – an analysis of collective movement as a data system, and GARLANDS, a review of abstract works from 2017-2023.
The subsequent chapters of the BEDTIME and BADTIME STORIES editions presented fun with form and content for a multi-generational audience. The program was complemented by the OPEN CALL: STRUCTURE OF TIME wall, presenting works by artists selected in an international call for entries, who treated the problem of the fourth dimension of reality in various ways.
The chapters of the cinema mural Odyssey were created by works by artists such as: Thomas Vanz, Boris Labbé, O Future, Dirk Koy, Arnaud Laffond, CC Mulligan, Holly Herndon, Thomas Pons, Ted Wiggin, Sabrina Ratté, Amanda Bonaiuto, Alex Gamsu Jenkins, Newnome Beauton, Samuel Pietri.
During two warm September nights, over 20,000 viewers composed their own Odyssey, moving between the ports of a single story and testing its meaning at their own pace.
For two nights, more than 20,000 spectators filled Wrocław’s Nadodrze district to enjoy futuristic visions of new media art and sci-fi. We prepared several themed walls, including REPETITION FUNCTION, ABSTRACTIVE INTELLIGENCE prepared by Peter Burr and CYBERTENETIC DREAMS curated by Mia White – an artificial intelligence. The collective presentation of works by dozens of artists from around the world, with Kidmograph as the highlight of the edition, resonated with both media and digital avant-garde artists. Particularly popular was the BADTIME STORIES project – original narratives by well-known Polish writers and poets combined with animations by foreign artists, created in partnership with the Korelacje Festival. At the end of Kinomural 2024, all the walls simultaneously projected the work of LILLIAN SCHWARTZ, an American artist and pioneer of digital art, who had passed away a few days earlier.
The 2024 edition was a celebration of new media art and a clear example of the Art&Science trend, and Wrocław – once again – became the world capital of moving murals.
The theme of the 2023 edition was Altered states of consciousness. Through their works, the invited artists explored the mysterious areas of functioning of the human mind. Extasy, trance, out-of-body experiences, hallucinations, narcotic visions, and other states that go beyond the confines of consciousness, were presented on the building walls of the Main Section. BLACK TRIP, CHOREOGRAPHY OF DIVERSITY, and CALEIDOSCOPE OF EXPERIENCES were the respective titles of the walls which displayed works by such artists as: Ryan D. Anderson, Sholim, Jamie Wolfe, RubenFro, Jon Noorlander or Steven Baltay. The DREAM BUCKETS wall, curated by Peter Burr, showed his selection of projects by American new
media artists. Seventeen creators, selected through yet another international Open Call, presented their oneiric visions on the GREAT DREAMS wall. The special event of this edition was the European premiere of Cycles of Creation by Guli Silberstein – which was also the first feature animation in Kinomural’s history.
We had awards and prizes, too: three equivalent financial awards were granted in the Main and the Open Call Sections.
Six tenement walls of the historic Nadodrze district of Wrocław hosted 75 works. For this one September night, 72 artists took control over the minds of thousands of Kinomural’s spectators.
Kinomural 2022 had works by artists from all around the globe whom the curators’ committee has selected to the main section, works awarded in an open call for audio-visual interpretations of a quote from Nick Cave’s song “Fireflies”, as well as animations by students of the Department of Media Art at the Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław.
The fourth edition of the event brought novelties to the program template. For the first time, each of the six projection walls had its leading theme.
The 3rd edition of Kinomural offered 5 tenement walls for the audience to watch over 90 large-scale projections by more than 50 audio-visual artists from Poland and abroad. There was also a special event – a project of the kinoMANUAL manufacture carried out together with Beata Rojek, which transformed one of the walls into a gigantic scanner which read a poem by Tadeusz Różewicz. The program also held the premiere presentation of “Threshold”, a project by Tomek Tryzna and Agata Bartos, as well as a “Bed-time cartoon” on the largest screen in the world.
The second edition of Kinomural featured nearly 90 works by 48 artists from 16 countries, displayed on 5 walls of Wroclaw’s Nadodrze District. There were stop-motion, drawn and meditative films, abstract, experimental, and feature works. This was also the first edition to show 3D animations.
For the very first time moving images came to life on 12 walls of 8 tenements. What a night that was! The district of Nadodrze was lit by around a dozen ephemeral projections.
