There has never been a uniform definition of what the visual arts in the Baltic Sea Culture Centre are or should be. Neither the space available, nor cultural identity of the exhibitors, nor the type of art to be presented has ever been a limit for us.

The Centre’s fixed exhibition venues are a gallery in the BSCC’s  seat in the Old Town Hall, and St. John’s International Culture Centre in Gdańsk.

In the tiny gallery in the Old Town Hall we present, mainly but not only, the works of local artists, very often even the youngest, still students of Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts, providing them with an opportunity to confront themselves with a professional exhibition space, with the tasks all artists must face when deciding to present their own works. Not only individual artists’ exhibitions, but also collective presentations of art groups take place in our Centre. The gallery is open to all art types – paintings (e.g. by Magda Beneda, Jan Misiek), sculptures (e.g. works by Anna Baumgart, by Günter Grass), multimedia projects (e.g. by Davido Grassi, DJ Spooky), photographs (e.g. by Erwin Schenkelbach, Piotr Wittman) and installations (e.g. by Unni Gjertsen, Mateusz Pęk).

St. John’s International Cultural Centre is a demanding but extraordinary place – at first it was the venue of travelling exhibitions (e.g. The Baltic Triennial of the Graphic Art, National Geographic Photography Exhibition) gradually and consistently evolving into the regions of site specific art, created directly for this particular place, conquering the space of a site, involving it into an art dialogue. The evolution was started in 2005 by Breathing Cathedral by Dominik Lejman and it was followed by subsequent installations: Daylight system by Mirosław Filonik, a presentation of stained glass designed by Olga Micińska, which attempted to put life into the interior of the church, and, finally - admired by everyone – The Messenger,  a video by Bill Viola, an icon of modern art. The idea behind Swietojanska Gallery was a natural consequence of all previous activities.
The first and - because of the rebuilding of St. John’s International Culture Centre – so far the only project prepared by Swietojanska Gallery has been an installation by an Austrian artist, Robert Stadler. A question mark composed of seven luminous spheres was first presented in March 2009 and since then it has been defining the very principles of the Gallery, which requires its creators and patrons to remain critical, inquisitive and ready to put things into question.

Fixed exhibition space is one side of the coin, but the other is art that detests limits, crosses boundaries, explores new regions and new opportunities. This impatience of art has always been our primary interest – it was in 1995 that we painted the walls of Gdańsk Shipyard. Later, during the celebration of the millennium of the city, after an international contest, 12 artists from all around the world worked on their paintings at the concrete walls in Zaspa, a tower block area of Gdańsk.

It often happens that art exceeds the tiny space of the Old Town Hall gallery and takes possession of the whole building – like in the case of small installations in Mayor’s Office, bigger ones in the basement or in the hall, or video presentations displayed on the historic walls – art-seeking explorations accompanied, among others, the 2007 exhibition To release emotions. Myths. Symbols. Systems.

The greatest international exhibition organised so far by the BSCC, famous all over Poland, Artist in Wonderland of 2007 found its proper venue in the Pomeranian Science and Technology Park in Gdynia. This exhibition invoked the shape of contemporary reality but, at the same time, it was deeply rooted in the poetics of fairytales, magic and myths. In this case, Wonderland became both a sphere of unreal - magic and dreams - and a place pervaded by absurdity and nonsense. A reference point for the construction of the exhibition was an element from Alice in Wonderland, a mysterious abandoned labyrinth with doors to several ways of perceiving reality. Artists from all around the world sought the answer to the question: What is Wonderland to us nowadays, when, bombarded by mass media and new technologies, we are hardly able to imagine it properly. We presented works by: Bergamot / Andrew Demirjian / Johan Grimonprez / Jarosław Fliciński/ Janez Janąa /Agnieszka Kalinowska / Andrzej Karmasz / Neeme KĂĽlm / Dominik Lejman / Robert Maciejuk / David Maljković / Agata Michowska / Alexandra Mitlyanskaya / Hanna Nowicka / Anneè Olofsson / Sini Pelkki / Killu Sukmit & Maari Laanemets / Johan Thurfjell / Anna Witkowska / Karolina Wysocka / Cui Xiuwen / Marek Zygmunt.