Our story
From a magazine to an institution
Two decades of contemporary urban art, public space and research, told from the beginning.
Our story begins before the Foundation existed. In the late 1990s a group of us started Brain Damage, an international magazine on graffiti and street art. We printed it for about a decade, showed artists such as Banksy long before the mainstream caught up and took part in artistic projects across Europe. In 2006 the magazine ended. We felt that the formula had run its course and that independent culture needed something more durable than a periodical.
In 2007 we registered the European Foundation for Urban Culture. The aims were clear from the start: to promote and develop urban culture, with contemporary urban art at its core, and to do it with the seriousness of an institution.
The festival years
In 2008 we launched the Lublin Urban Art Festival, later known as LFG: All My City. Over nine editions it grew into the largest cyclical urban art festival in Poland, with jams, film premieres, panel discussions, exhibitions and interventions in public space. In 2014 we hosted Martha Cooper, the documentarian of New York street culture, for her first Polish exhibition, several hundred photographs and a meeting with the artist. In 2026 we brought the exhibition back, this time in Warsaw.
Walls followed. Kamil Kuzko’s mural commemorating the Lublin July of 1980 (2010), Waone’s wall on Jasna Street (2012), Etam Cru on Lubartowska Street (2014) and the 7×700 cycle for the 700th anniversary of Lublin (2017–2018). In 2022 Waone came back to Jasna Street and repainted his wall as a stand against the war in Ukraine.
The gallery
In 2012 we opened Brain Damage Gallery in Lublin, Poland’s first gallery devoted to contemporary urban art and its evolution. It started on the third floor of an empty building, without windows or electricity, and moved four times. From 2016 to 2023 it occupied 230 square metres on the ground floor of the Centre for the Meeting of Cultures. Exhibitions such as They Call Us Vandals, Metro Lublin and It’s Framed, with works by Banksy, Vhils, D*Face and Nawer from private collections, brought the gallery visitors from all over Poland. Since 2024 the gallery is BD, and it has a new home in Warsaw at Puławska 31.
Research
Research has been part of our work from the beginning. In 2008 we published a report on young non-governmental organisations in Poland, now held in the Library of the Polish Parliament. In 2012 we initiated the Observatory of Culture, a programme with local universities on Lublin’s cultural sector. In 2023 we established IKI Institute, our own interdisciplinary research organisation.
Today
We work at every scale, from a single wall to multi-year programmes. We organise international festivals and exhibitions, run workshops, film screenings, meetings and discussions, and carry out projects in public space and with local communities. Beyond Polish cities we have worked in New York, Paris, Berlin, Kyiv, Tbilisi, Stockholm, Prague, Košice, Lisbon, Lviv, Minsk and Budapest, among other places.
Within the European Capital of Culture Lublin 2029 we run BD Projects (2024–2026). And from Warsaw we keep doing what we started with: showing where contemporary urban art is going.
