Host
Jerzy Bereś, Ewelina Chrzanowska, Jesse Darling, Tomasz Kowalski, Joanna Piotrowska, Agnieszka Polska, Șerban Savu

23.05–29.06.2024

In Vienna, a rented apartment is generally unfurnished. In Warsaw, things are different. I inherited my Warsaw apartment fully renovated, but with a mass of impractical heritage objects. Some of them were gathered up by dealers from Krakow, the rest I packed in the attic or the cellar.

I left behind a large, probably over 100-year-old bookshelf with a stylized Eiffel Tower etched in the glass. Whenever I look at it, I wonder why someone would have held onto that piece of junk for so many years. Today you couldn’t even get 500 euros for it.

We have bodies. That means that, like it or not, we leave behind traces in objects, floors, and walls. Even treading carefully in thick, soft socks, after we take a million steps from the living room to the kitchen we have worn a path. There’s an aura left behind when we’re cut out of a picture. The headrest of the bed is slightly rubbed away. Worn wallpaper, tracks from a chair. These are small dents in spaces where our bodies fit best, then our children’s bodies, then our partners’, our more-or-less close acquaintances’, and finally, strangers’.

I decided to make an exhibition about the spaces you leave behind. Visiting somewhere for the first time, you see those involuntary traces. When you’re somewhere for the last time – the traces left are yours. It’s a bit like you’ve moved out, removed the furniture, taken down the pictures. The traces of our presence reveal themselves even when everything is packed in boxes and carried away. Even in those apartments that seem to be perfectly clean and tidy.