“Bugs, apartment blocks, core, energy, power supply, burndown, pesticides, asbestos, renovation, garbage dump, human activity, normal activity, grey morning, grey fragrance, harvest.”

— Zuza Piekoszewska’s stream of consciousness that came up during a conversation about the exhibition.


Zuza has the unusual gift of sensing things that are not alive. Forms seemingly frozen still appear to be teeming with a certain microactivity that can be felt more clearly the more time we spend on looking at them closely. I suppose it seems to be nothing. Zuza’s works however do recall memories and echoes of bygone fundamental energies, inducing that most strange feeling where one can make themselves aware of their own presence. In order to see that specific type of emotion in things you need remoteness. The objects must lose their primary function and meaning that we imbue them with in our everyday experience. They then function on a border between two worlds – rationality and uselessness, life and the taking of life. In one of the works we can see an old kitchen towel that, ripped apart, opens up in the middle as if two tired lids of a primordial organism awoken from its slumber. Like the eyes of an elderly person or animal, this cataract-shrouded eye does not only reveal the experience of this individual but that of all matter, alive and dead. Of a reality that seems unceasing, somewhat tired of its persisting, where the past and the future coalesce into one structure. As in the work with the two insects joined together in a lover’s embrace whose fish-like faces fill up with a grimace that eludes any attempts at ascribing any emotion to it. This lack of relation to a specific statement is perhaps most arresting as it expresses existence in its pure form, devoid of its intentionality and causality. Zuza’s practice primarily invokes that feeling of transience that never ends in death. Rather than as a realisation of a concrete idea, the works emerge as a result of initiating a process. Extinct, withered plants appear to bloom once more but in a way that we have heretofore not noticed. Old, decrepit and useless objects that typically make up visions of the apocalypse now paradoxically become the allies of life and enduring. There is no youth which means there is none of the dreariness of ageing. Zuza’s exhibition does not take a stance, it does not express any view, it fights for nothing. It is a record of moments where, bewildered, you accept the fact that you’re still breathing, you’re still here.

— Przemek Sowiński