Collection

Marta Romankiv’s project is an interventionist art action drawing attention to the exclusion of immigrants from democratic processes in Poland. Before the 2020 presidential election, Romankiv organized a symbolic vote in six cities and art institutions, allowing people without Polish citizenship to cast ballots that were formally invalid but socially significant.

The sealed ballot boxes became symbols of their political invisibility. Romankiv challenges the archaic divisions between citizens and non-citizens, raising questions about redefining citizenship and making democracy more inclusive. Her project blends art and activism, emphasizing that immigrants are full members of society who should have the right to participate in shaping its future.

The photograph Jak Buba bobu tak Boba Bubie shows the artist Andrzej Rzepecki in front of the Ministry of Culture and Art in 1983. Captured in the frame is Kozakiewicz’s gesture – symbolic and provocative – which serves as a clear commentary on the communist authorities of the time and their censorship policies toward independent art. The photo was taken by Marek Grygiel.

Unknown by Ala Savashevich is a monumental headless figure made of metal and felt – materials that are both raw and soft, evoking power but also corporeality and vulnerability. Created in 2021, the work recalls images of old monuments – historical figures that disappear from public space as dominant political narratives shift. The artist examines the mechanisms of collective erasure, posing the question: why does the gesture of breaking with the past so often begin with symbolic decapitation? Removing a figure’s head not only strips it of identity but also highlights the difficulty of confronting the past – unwanted, painful, suppressed. In this context, Unknown becomes a metaphor for collective amnesia and an attempt to capture the moment when history is dehumanized and memory reduced to incomplete forms.

Gdansk Collection of Contemporary Art, a deposit of the City of Gdansk in the collection of NOMUS – New Art Museum, Branch of the National Museum in Gdansk

In the spring of 2006, Janek Simon travelled to the capital of Madagascar, Antananarivo, with a suitcase full of artworks with the aim of organizing a Polish exhibition – a mockery of official government cultural events. Yet, paradoxically, Simon’s suitcase contained no artworks by Polish artists. Instead, it featured artworks by the Czech group Guma Guar, the Romanian Vlad Nancy, the Bulgarians Binder, referring to the problems of Poland during the transformation period: the growth of nationalism, the decline of the public space, as well as mass consumption and Poland's participation in the Iraq War — as if resurrecting Polish dreams of belonging to the Western elites.

Janek Simon managed to combine the repressed memories of colonial ambitions with a double absence: the lack of a Polish colony in Madagascar and Polish artists at the "Polish Year" exhibition. The artist examines the ideas of Polishness in various ways, confronting visions of magnitude with hang-ups and failures. He breaks the linear story of the colonization of the South-East by the North-West and undermines the divisions into the centre and periphery, victim and executioner, rewriting history textbooks and contemporary postcolonial studies literature.

The video is inspired by Olga Boznańska. Swinarska focused on the painter’s work clothes, an old-fashioned, 19th-century dress and an apron. She rented a similar one from the theatre and arranged her own room to resemble Boznańska’s studio in Paris.

Playing the part of Boznańska, Swinarska says that the dress adds momentum and that thanks to it her gestures become more expressive, emphasizing the importance of the dress in building the artist-painter identity and the medium of painting itself, deemed irrelevant by the contemporary art world. The dress becomes a symbol of the conventional language of images — simultaneously attractive and out-dated.

The installation documents the transformations in the area of the former Gdańsk Shipyard, perceived as the place of birth, boom, and decline of the ‘Solidarity’ workers’ movement and an example of the thriving shipbuilding industry. For a number of years (1999-2013), Szlaga recorded the progressing destruction of the shipyard. He photographed the architectural transformations, the devastation of grand, and 19th-century brick buildings, such as the Director’s Villa with a library, as a symbol of the decline of the culture and intellectual thought that had been present since the establishment of the shipyard. The muted colours and expertly composed landscapes and portraits are a symbolic record of Poland’s transformation, the wasted human potential and painful processes of change that took place in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe.

The work consists of three individual elements in the form of the letters S, O, and S, shaped from welded sheet metal and filled with metal and wood scraps and fragments of equipment collected from the Gdańsk Shipyard.

This work is a repository of material remnants of the shipyard’s heritage, a material document of protest and social mobilization, expressed with the use of seemingly redundant remainders of a declining workplace. While it was created as a monument-sculpture, the piece also serves as an object for community activities, an example of which was rolling it around the buildings in the degraded post-industrial areas.

The performance consists of choreography and sounds created by shipyard workers, directed by Wollny and Szwajgier. The authors of the compositions use similarities between the structure of the working day and the typical structure of a song. Fragments of free time are distinguished from parts of the work, just as verses can be separated from choruses. The free time (verses) is subtle, soothing and kind of disappears in space — with fragments of conversations, playing ping-pong, and opening beer cans. The refrains (work) are loud, with relentless sounds of metal objects, light and heavy-duty tools, sounds of grinding and welding (and the accompanying almost baroque sparks of light) that fill the entire hall. Through their performance, the men furnish the memory of the shipyard with a bodily dimension, in which sound becomes the carrier of memories.

Wollny, who typically incorporates the local context (both architecture and people) into her compositions, constructs an interesting tension between the labour of the workers that results in a material practical object (for example a ship), and an artistic work whose product is a work of art. In this case, both work and free time become activities that have succumbed equally to capitalist rule.

The video does not have a clear beginning and end. Like the eponymous matter it overflows through the screen. The grain is poured over, piled up and put into the round bodily forms that rest on the protagonist's lap. In smaller and larger fragments, a naked female body emerges from under it. Parallel to this mystery of nature (next to the grain there are beets, parsley and geraniums) and female primordiality (the sound of breathing dominates in the background), scenes of the artist wearing a red jumpsuit and wig take place. The grain is replaced by white feathers. Subjectivity and intuition have replaced here the structural, systemic and analytical elements that characterized the experimental film of the previous decade. In these thoroughly sensual rituals, filled with both erotic and fetish elements, as well as references to archetypal meanings, Tyszkiewicz was ceaselessly performing using her body.