By Kraków’s Open Eyes Art Festival has opened its sixth edition with a broader collaboration between the city’s art institutions and a programme built around contemporary artistic exchange. Running from 5 to 22 November 2026, the festival is presenting exhibitions, student projects and accompanying events at venues including the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, the Kraków University of Economics and Nowa Huta Cultural Centre. ([oeaf.pl](https://oeaf.pl/edycje/?utm_source=openai))
The event is a current cultural development rather than a retrospective: its opening programme began on Thursday, 5 November, and the exhibitions remain available during the present weekend and throughout the following two weeks. The organisers describe the 2026 edition under the Polish title “Roje i Watahy”, broadly evoking swarms and packs, and use the festival to connect different artistic practices, generations and academic communities.
Three academies join the student programme
One of the most notable changes this year is the expansion of the festival’s student-focused Open Art section. The Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków is working together with the Academy of Music and the Academy of Theatre Arts, allowing projects to move beyond a single visual-art discipline. The cooperation creates space for installations, performance, sound, theatre and projects involving more than one institution. ([oeaf.pl](https://oeaf.pl/edycje/?utm_source=openai))
The organisers’ programme lists “Open Art: From Dawn to Dusk” as one of the central exhibitions. It presents inter-academic student projects and is accompanied by other displays developed by individual departments of the Academy of Fine Arts. The result is a festival structure that gives emerging artists a public setting while also showing how teaching institutions can collaborate as cultural producers.
The Kraków city information service says that this year’s programme includes 17 projects in a joint category involving the three academies and a new accessibility strand. Among the examples are sensory and sound-based works, including a concert experienced in darkness and a project focused on sound and touch. ([krakow.pl](https://krakow.pl/aktualnosci/342967%2C33%2Ckomunikat%2Cprzed_nami_6__edycja_open_eyes_art_festival.html?utm_source=openai))
Exhibitions across the academy building
The main academy site at Plac Jana Matejki is being used as a concentrated exhibition space. The programme includes presentations by the painting, sculpture, graphic arts and intermedia departments, as well as exhibitions of scholarship-supported projects and work by staff members connected with teaching at the academy.
One of the exhibitions, “Interrupted Halfway”, focuses on ideas by artists and educators that were never completed. Another, “Called by Light”, treats light not simply as illumination but as an active element in sculptural form and the way viewers experience an object. A separate presentation, “What Do I Talk About When I Talk About Time”, links established artistic experience with the work of younger artists and their mentors. ([oeaf.pl](https://oeaf.pl/en/program/?utm_source=openai))
The festival also includes the latest instalment of the “Space for Art” series, devoted to painter Adam Brincken. The exhibition is distributed between three locations: the University of Economics, the Academy of Fine Arts and Nowa Huta Cultural Centre. This arrangement extends the festival beyond one campus and encourages visitors to see the city’s institutions as part of a connected cultural route.
A meeting point for art, education and the city
Open Eyes Art Festival grew out of the wider Open Eyes Economy movement, which promotes discussion about society, responsibility and the future. Its organisers present art as a way to interpret contemporary life and to create contact between artists, students, researchers and the public. The 2026 edition retains that interdisciplinary ambition while giving greater visibility to student production and collaboration between Kraków’s higher-education institutions. ([oeaf.pl](https://oeaf.pl/?utm_source=openai))
Most of the academy exhibitions are scheduled to continue through 22 November, with free admission listed for several of the principal presentations. Visitors are advised to check the festival programme before travelling, since opening hours and individual event arrangements vary. For Kraków, the festival offers a compact autumn circuit in which new work, teaching practice and public cultural participation meet in the same urban setting.
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