Cricoteka – the Tadeusz Kantor Museum and a modern cultural institution

Cricoteka is a hybrid cultural institution consisting of a museum, archive, research centre, contemporary art gallery, and a space for cultural events: concerts, performances, film screenings, and educational activities, including workshops for children and adults. The Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor Cricoteka is a cultural institution of the Małopolska Voivodeship.

With its founder, Tadeusz Kantor, an initiator of new trends in Polish art and creator of an internationally renowned avant-garde theatre, as the starting point, Cricoteka promotes contemporary art that resonates with its theoretical and artistic ideas, through education, exhibition, performance, theatre, music, and other forms of dissemination.

Cricoteka was founded in Kraków in 1980 on the initiative of Tadeusz Kantor as a living archive of the Cricot 2 Theatre. It is used as a place to store, present, and look after the collection of theatre objects from Kantor’s plays, drawings and documents related to the artist’s work. Cricoteka researches, promotes and presents the art of Tadeusz Kantor. The Tadeusz Kantor Museum, established within the institution, preserves, develops, and shares the collection of objects, costumes, and archives of the Cricot 2 Theatre.

The Cricoteka collection is the starting point for the institution’s programme. Relying on the forty years of our activity, we take advantage of the opportunities offered by the multi-functional building of our headquarters, while taking care of the Tadeusz Kantor Gallery-Studio at 7/5 Sienna Street – the place where the artist spent the last years of his life, currently a branch of Cricoteka.

Opened in September 2014, the Cricoteka headquarters at 2-4 Nadwiślańska Street in Kraków is a two-building complex – a former power plant and a modern structure. The historic building houses a theatre, archive, and Cricoteka offices, while the new part houses an exhibition and educational space, and a café. The shape of the new building is a reference to Tadeusz Kantor’s drawing “Man and Table” and to the artist’s ideas of packaging, emballage, and monuments of impossible architecture.