The exhibition brings together a heterogeneous selection of works from late modernity and the contemporary period. While not directly related to one another, they allow for reflection on the changes taking place in the work of shaping collective memory.
The first part of the exhibition consists of a series of photographs by Eustachy Kossakowski (1925– 2001), taken in 1989 during the Kazimir Malevich exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, alongside an installation by Edward Krasiński (1925–2004), originally prepared in 2001 for his solo exhibition in Berlin.
The photographs show one of Malevich’s cubist paintings from 1913, together with works dating from the late 1920s. Kossakowski approaches the founder of abstraction’s paintings as though they were interior landscapes: he traverses them with the camera lens, reframes them, cuts fragments. Through this gesture, he achieves a striking interpretive effect, drawing attention to overlooked details and amplifying the images' dramatic nature. In the figurative works of the 1920s, he restores the tension of abstract form, revealing alternative readings of their enigmatic imagery. This is particularly evident in the landscape with barracks: by cutting off the sky’s blue along the horizon line, the buildings remain suspended on red — one might say blood-soaked — ground, reinforcing the presumed reading of the painting depicting labor camps. Kossakowski’s photographic “reportage” is not only an inquiry into ways of seeing; it also gives visual form to one of the central tensions in the history of modernism: that between modern form and the necessity of confronting trauma. The portfolio of ten photographs was produced in 2010 at the initiative of Andrzej Turowski, in consultation with Anka Ptaszkowska, who represents the artist’s estate.
Edward Krasiński’s installation is composed of mirrors in a format typical of portrait painting, suspended in space at eye level. The black reverse of the mirrors, together with his signature blue Scotch tape, generates an abstract pattern within the gallery space. Applied at a height of 130 cm, the blue tape is reflected and multiplied in the mirrors, producing an unsettling, labyrinthine environment. Above all, the installation functions as a trap for the spectator. It is the viewer’s own presence — repeated, layered, and fragmentary reflections of their face — that fills the work with images. This experience resonates with contemporary models of perception: inherently fragmented, multilayered, vulnerable to overstimulation, and never fully complete. At the same time, the work can be viewed as an essay on the relationship between abstract forms and the forms of life that disrupt them.
The second part of the exhibition brings together Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s sculpture Exercises in Ceroplastics (2019) and a series of photographs by Artur Żmijewski documenting the façade of the Warszawa Gdańska railway station in Warsaw.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s sculpture was originally conceived as a memorial commemorating the murder of a group of twenty-nine Roma in 1942 in a forest near Borzęcin by the German gendarmerie, aided by the Polish Blue Police. The monument depicts the cowering, terrified figures of a woman and a man, alongside a plaque marking the crime and bearing a quotation from a poem by Papusza. The entire work was carved in larch wood. In 2016, the monument in Borzęcin was brutally destroyed: the sculptures were hacked to pieces and the plaque torn from the ground. This was a shocking and traumatic act of violence — not only against the Roma community, but against society as a whole, which defines itself and its future through a commitment to justice for victims of persecution and ethnic cleansing. Although the memorial was reconstructed in its original location, Mirga-Tas devoted a separate work to its destruction. The remnants collected after the attack — splinters and fragments, not always identifiable — were cast in stearin, a fragile, soft material, its colour reminiscent of human skin. In Exercises in Ceroplastics, this attention to the remains carries a double meaning. It preserves the pain and terror produced first by the murder itself, and then by the desecration of the victims’ memory. It also reveals something fundamental about commemoration: that the ongoing work of engaging with memory, and the emotions bound up with it, are more fundamental than the material durability of monuments.
Artur Żmijewski’s photographs from 2024 document the decaying building of Warszawa Gdańska station, now slated for demolition. Designed by Stanisław Kaller, the station was built in 1959. From the outset, it was conceived as a temporary structure, both because of the need for rapid construction and because it was erected on the remains of ruins, offering no certainty as to the ground’s stability. The building took the form of an elegant modernist pavilion, defined by simple frames and carefully composed axes that emphasize the balance between diagonals and horizontal dominants. Its façade was clad in a surface made of rubble and waste materials — sandstone, limestone, and andesite — forming an abstract mosaic of colours and textures. As its designers explained, this solution was intended to preserve the composition's coherence in the event of cracks caused by uneven settling. It suggests that, while working within the framework of rational modernism and the language of abstraction, the architect was able to inscribe the building with the memory of wartime ruins still vividly present in the traumatized city, little more than a decade after the war. Żmijewski photographs the building in full awareness of its subsequent history. Warszawa Gdańska was the site from which Polish Jews were forced to leave the country following the antisemitic campaign of March 1968, and the dramatic, materially charged avant-garde mosaic became the backdrop to those events. In the late 1990s, a commemorative plaque marking this history was placed on the façade.
Żmijewski’s photographic “reportage” emerges from a site marked by double trauma — the destruction of the city and the violence of antisemitic state policy — now fading amid the ongoing redevelopment of Warszawa Gdańska station. The artist poses an implicit question about the nature of commemoration: what form can it take within a newly designed modern environment of impersonal towers and sleek glass façades? How, under these new conditions, can the tension between abstract form and the materiality of suffering still be articulated?