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The artistic project is based on transforming emotions, memories, and imaginings associated with home — both as a physical site and as a state of mind. The artist refers to Warsaw, the city her grandparents came from and where she herself settled, as well as to her roots in the Suwałki region, a borderland of Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus. She reflects on what home means today, also in the context of forced migration, uprooting, and the human relationship with nature.
The exhibition is accompanied by a sound installation composed of recordings from the artist’s apartment in a Warsaw tenement house and from the Brzozowski Palace. The nineteenth-century residence, severely damaged during the Warsaw Uprising, belonged to the Belina-Brzozowski family until the end of the war. After reconstruction, the palace served various functions. Today it houses office spaces, an art gallery, and apartments.
A house, though seemingly the same, can become a different home. When people return to their family houses after many years, they are often surprised to discover that rooms and objects differ from those preserved in memory — for instance, they appear smaller.
New tenants bring their own lives and stories into former interiors.
In the outlines of houses one may discern faces. Windows are eyes, doors are mouths. Such portraits often appear in children’s drawings.
In windows lit with warm light, one can see the silhouettes of furniture and sometimes figures. This sight evokes both a sense of safety and curiosity.
Visiting abandoned buildings bearing traces of former inhabitants is both unsettling and fascinating. It feels like entering the sacred sphere of someone’s intimacy.
“Home” is important for everyone, regardless of beliefs or experience. It has both a physical and an immaterial dimension. It is filled with feelings, emotions, and memory. It has concrete shapes, unique corners and spaces, yet it also conceals shadows and the incomprehensible.
In most homes, constant change takes place. Something is being built. Something is falling apart.
We carry within us images of what a home should be. Sometimes we experience a tension between those images and reality.
Home can be a core — a place where what matters most develops: closeness, acceptance, trust, community. But it can also be a painful void, a façade, a substitute, or an arena of conflict. It may be warm, bright, and welcoming, or inaccessible, cold, and full of darkness and suffocating secrets. At times it becomes an aspiration or an unattainable idea — a dream, a longing. There are people who do not have a home: the lonely, the excluded, emigrants, refugees…
A human being is also a home — for microorganisms, for thoughts and feelings, for their children and for themselves.
We inhabit not only language, but also the gaze — a unique vision of the world.
