Collection

In her more than 16-meter-long textile piece, Monika Drożyńska weaves together language, memory, and migration. Hand-embroidered and painted letters, along with fragments of interviews with people who have experienced displacement, form a dense, multilingual narrative. At the centre are three letters – German “Ö”, Ukrainian “Ґ”, and Polish “Ć” – each the fifth in its respective alphabet. They symbolize different systems of power and resistance, assimilation and exclusion. Texts in six languages (English, German, Ukrainian, Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish) give voice to those often unheard – personal, emotional, unofficial.

The texts are the result of many conversations held in foreign languages, across cultures, and notably – under COVID conditions. Hand embroidery becomes a carrier of intimate memory, in contrast to printed letters that bear the weight of institutional messaging. The work creates a space of tension between what is written and remembered, and what is silenced and unconscious.

Elvin Flamingo's The Symbiosity of Creation is an encounter between two cultures: human and non-human, an interspecies co-dependency that began in 2012, when he placed incubators with the queen and first few workers in a studio located in the basement of his family home.

The carefully designed incubators allow you to view the complex system of interconnected containers, which the ants fill with their systematic activities. Microphones and cameras enable the transmission of sounds and images to external screens and online.

The artwork, considered to be one of the most fascinating pieces of the art + science trend, can now be seen in the building of the Faculty of Biology at the University of Gdańsk. The project will end with the death of the queen when the ant superorganism will naturally decay and its constituent individuals will die. This is predicted to be in approximately 2034.

1. Incorrect Diagnosis, 30 × 21 cm;
2. Clone 813, 30 × 21 cm;
3. Virus Repository, 30 × 21 cm;
4. Probe 91, 30 × 21 cm;
5. Mosquito 2, 30 × 21 cm;
6. Cloned Universe, 30 × 21 cm;
7. Virus 463, 30 × 21 cm;
8. Perfect Genotype, 30 × 21 cm;
9. Virus 79, 30 × 21 cm;
10. The beginning of history, 21 × 15 cm;
11. Chimneys in the brain, 21 × 30 cm;
12. Amplified viruses and bacteria, 30 × 21 cm;
13. Genotype 419, 21 × 30 cm;
14. Virus mutant, 30 × 21 cm;
15. Virus 18, 21 × 30 cm;
16. Winning Combination, 30 × 21 cm;
17. Extended Phenotype, 30 × 21 cm;
18. Cloning Process 128, 26 × 19 cm;
19. Bacterial Centre, 25 × 21 cm; 
20. The Beginning of History 2, 30 × 21 cm;
21. A Failed Attempt, 30 × 21 cm;
22. Bacterial Warehouse, 30 × 21 cm;
23. Mosquito 1, 30 × 21 cm;
24. Probe 1302, 30 × 21 cm;
25. Bacterial Conversations, 30 × 21 cm;
26. Stabilizer, 30 × 21 cm;
27. Robot 1, 21 × 26 cm;
28. Robot 2, 21 × 30 cm

The Hospital Diary series documents the artist’s emotions, struggles and pursuit of his unconscious (at the time) return to art. From that moment, over the next year and a half, the drawings multiplied and flourished in untamed biological forms and abstract realms, extending from the scale of a single cell to the entire universe. The titles provide us with some clues: bacteria, viruses, mutants, phenotypes, clones, genotypes, as does the accompanying powerful machinery: the stabilizer, repository, warehouse, a probe, a robot.

Although the artist did not recognize these twenty-eight hospital drawings as works of art for a long time, they have the same obsessive air and systemic, multiplied details as the insect cultures inhabiting glass incubators.

For a number of years, Gliszczyński has been steadily developing his own relationship with the act of painting, as well as creating spatial objects from its leftovers, in the context of philosophical considerations and theoretical and practical research.

One of the characteristic features of Krzysztof Gliszczyński’s artistic practice is the careful gathering in the studio of various waste generated in the process of artistic creation.  This could be for instance dried paint, scraped off a canvas (the series entitled Urny [Urns]), or used latex gloves arranged in transparent tondos.

Through the layering of multi-coloured details, the composition An eye on a fingertip evokes connotations with the collage technique or neo-impressionist mosaics. Subsequent layers of latex gloves covered with paint residues, deliberately squeezed into a transparent object, create a multidimensional painterly plane.

The installation collects and records individual history, traces and gestures, as well as the matter’s memory.

In 2005, Elżbieta Jabłońska came across Nowe Życie in a place that later became her home. The restoration efforts lasted several years and involved several art galleries that joined forces to rebuild individual tubes-letters and in 2009 the sign was working again. The artist links this gesture with the ideas, history and traditions of the cooperative movement in Poland and the figure of activist Zygmunt Chmielewski – the director of the Department of Agriculture and Crown Goods and author of the cooperatives’ decalogue. The values proclaimed by Chmielewski concerned not only effective cooperation, but also the importance of mutual help and respect. From the moment it was given a new life, the neon sign was placed on the roofs of art institutions, in parks, on the façade of a power plant, and travelled by barge along the Noteć River. It appeared in conflict-ridden places that await change and a new life.

SHAME is a sculpture in the shape of a ball resting on an aluminium frame covered with duck and goose feathers. At close range, however, one can see and smell that there is tar underneath the feathers. This combination of materials transports us into the past, when tarring and feathering was not just a form of public torture, but above all a humiliating and degrading punishment. The artist, also active as an anti-violence and women’s rights activist, often employs unusual materials and media that create a characteristic language, where personal emotions and public attitude build a unique, multi-layered conglomerate of meanings. Janin’s work was inspired by Joanna Krakowska’s text, Entartete Kunst, about a fictitious algorithm called ‘SHAME, which allows uncovering, with the help of mathematics, the relationship between the level of democracy with a state and the function of decisions made in relation to contemporary art. 

Apart from social attitudes towards art and the notion of community, Janin encrypts in this sculpture the functions of the internet – a contemporary tool of scorn, anonymous accusations, data and images theft, and all other forms of cyberbullying, which gives a global dimension to humiliation.

The artwork consists of a thin sheet of paper extracted from the family archive. It is marked with the stamp of an attorney’s office in Warsaw and covered on both sides with slanted, small writing in pencil. It is a note recreated from memory by attorney Juliusz Kloss detailing his participation in a spiritualist séance held in Laski near Warsaw.

For a number of years, Zuzanna Janin has been working with all kinds of her and her family’s archives and resources. These include both material objects – such as textiles, dead insects, building debris, and letters as well as remembered family histories. Family and home constitute a crucial element in her creative process, a persistent conjuring up of ghosts and retaining them in the present day.

The title of the work I Clench my Fists in Anger clearly indicates how it should be interpreted. Clenched fists are an expression of anger that can result from both personal experiences and observations of social or political phenomena. This gesture means, on the one hand, a threat and an impending blow, and on the other – struggle, protest, but also a victory. Symbolically, anger is enchanted in an earthen mass and, through multiplication, becomes a mixture of dissatisfaction, rage, agitation, irritation, and worry. A fleeting experience is juxtaposed with the coolness, stability, and durability of the material. Paradoxically, the creation of this work would not be possible without releasing the material from a clenched fist, relaxing the muscles, and releasing emotions.

The photograph is a double portrait of the artist Hiwa K and of Aleksandra Olszewska, who for many years volunteered to sweep the surroundings of the Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers of 1970 in Solidarity Square in Gdańsk. Although she ran a souvenir kiosk at the entrance to the shipyard, she was mainly dedicated to this invisible, informal labour. Having learnt about Olszewska’s history, the artist balanced her battered sweeping brush on his nose and put his arm around the woman. This gesture evokes additional associations with the artist’s early work, Cooking with Mama (2005) that revealed to the world the many years of domestic labour performed by the artist's mother. Hiwa K notices that which is hidden, discreet, overlooked, unremarkable, and vernacular. Moving the underestimated, invisible labour of an elderly woman from a horizontal to a vertical position suddenly makes her activity stand out. The gesture ‘verticalizes’ the horizontal, modest, informal and humble, to the massive form of a soaring monument.