Modernity is Out of Date
Jean Cocteau, Aldona Jabłońska-Klimczak, Dominik Jałowiński, Kora, Anna Laskowska, Anastasia Rydlevskaya, Bogdan Ziętek

The formula attributed to Nietzsche captures not only a feeling of ddiscomfort and disappointment with the era in which he lived. Living in our time, we share this sentiment, finding nothing unusual about it. Yet something more is at stake – grasping the moment that triggers an enigmatic mechanism of dismantling, fissuring, and dislocation, a return to a time that never was.

The “anachronism” of the works presented in this exhibition is not a nostalgia for a lost time, but rather an appeal to the era of the idiolect, wherein the visual event has somewhat frozen and resisted turning into a conceptual algorithm, animating its relevance „belatedly”, as it were.

The idiolect stands in opposition to the idiom of the contemporary visual scene—which is oriented toward current socio-cultural messaging—by asserting the untranslatability of individual emotion, as well as the intensity and singularity of lived experience; these elements elude the dictates of historicism and the chronological order that otherwise guides our steps in the realm of art. The term “modernity” is fraught with a troublesome ambivalence. On the one hand, it implies the prestige and dignity of “being up to date”; on the other, it carries the inevitable risk of transience—the very quality that makes us look back with pity on the once-vaunted “relevance” of ideas that have long since faded. Today, they seem as ridiculous to us as pagers and compact discs.

The works in the exhibition are united by the theme of religious, erotic, and fetishistic transgressions—the intermingling of forbidden dreams with an unorthodox, subliminal experience of the sacred, in which imagined mythologies play a significant role. Everything here unfolds on the borderline, in a no-man’s-land where smugglers exchange dual passports.

The selection of artists is equally unconventional, ranging from Jean Cocteau—who today evokes a sense of wonder akin to finding Elvis Presley and the Bible inside a space capsule opened by our distant cousins ​​from Mars—to the rock star Kora, an artist associated more with exuberant, animal-and-plant-infused pantheism than with the Virgin Mary cult. Anna Laskowska and Aldona Jabłońska-Klimczak explore the intersection of religiosity, myth, and the animal world; Anastasia Rydlewskaya taps into prehistoric strata of non-binary gender identities; and Dominik Jałowiński rounds out the group with a paradoxical synthesis hovering between cultural cliché and oneiric phantasm.

The work of Bogdan Ziętek—which serves as the exhibition’s symbolic bond and in which the Madonna readily cedes her divine authority to sexy pin-up girls—imbues the whole with the experience of the “hour” that never struck.

Andrzej Wajs

Artists:

Jean Cocteau
Poet, playwright, film director, screenwriter, director, painter, stage choreographer. Born in 1889 in Maisons-Laffitte, died in 1963 in Milly-la-Forêt, France. He worked in the spirit of surrealism and metaphysical poetry. He was one of the first to realise the full vision of surrealism in film. He produced drawings of a homoerotic nature. Major literary works: • The Terrible Children (French: Les Enfants terribles), 1929; • Opium: Journal of a Detoxification (Opium: Journal d’une désintoxication), 1930. His most important film: The Blood of a Poet (Le sang d’un poète), 1930. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world, including: • Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 2024.

Aldona Jabłońska
Visual artist and philosopher. Born in 1948 in Gdańsk. Lives and works in Warsaw. She graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy at the Academy of Catholic Theology (now the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University) in Warsaw. From the mid-1970s until the fall of communism, she was involved in the independence movement. After the introduction of martial law in Poland, she participated in organising the underground Solidarity movementHer works have been exhibited, among others, in Warsaw, Białystok, Zakopane, and Barcelona.

Dominik Jałowiński
Visual artist, performer, painter, and collage artist. Born in 1981 in Lublin, Poland. Lives and works in Toruń. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, receiving his diploma in 2008 from the Painting Department in the studio of Professor Krzysztof Wachowiak. His works and performances have been presented in galleries and museums including the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture at Królikarnia (a branch of the National Museum in Warsaw), the Mazovian Centre for Contemporary Art “Elektrownia” in Radom, the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, the Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, the European Performance Art Festival EPAF’07 in Lublin, and the International Performance Art Festival at Arsenał Gallery in Białystok.

Kora (1951-1918)
Singer, poet, visual artist. A legendary icon of the Polish rock scene, singer and songwriter. Frontwoman of the band Maanam, with whom she recorded numerous hits. She created the image of a pop artist who appeals to audiences across generations. She is the creator of the ‘Madonn’ series of paintings and sculptures, which depart from the canonical image of the Virgin Mary.

Anna Laskowska
(born 2003, Wrocław, Poland) Anna Laskowska is currently a student in the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She was awarded the Rector’s Scholarship for the 2024/2025 academic year. In her artistic practice, she draws on Polish culture, exploring the intersection of Christian traditions—deeply rooted in the country’s national identity—with ancient, often forgotten Slavic beliefs. Her work focuses on the symbolism of animals, particularly the serpent. She also reflects on femininity, examining the historical and cultural associations between women and reptilian imagery, as well as their presence in myths and folk beliefs.

Anastasia Rydlevskaya
Artist, philologist, and musician. Born in 1995 in Minsk, Belarus. Since late 2021, she has lived and worked in Gdańsk, Poland. She graduated in French Philology from the Belarusian State University in Minsk, having previously studied at INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Sorbonne Paris Cité) in Paris. She received her artistic education under Stanislav Prokopenko, Lizaveta Guseva, Helen Hil, and Vladimir Novak. Selected solo exhibitions: • Veiled/Unveiled, Biuro Wystaw, as part of Warsaw Gallery Weekend, Warsaw, 2025; • Snake Charmer, CreateCulture Space, Vilnius, 2024; • The Sun Is Shining Strange Today Again, Museum of Free Belarus, Warsaw, 2022.

Bogdan Ziętek
Sculptor and creator of drawings, paintings, photographs, clothing, music, and poetry. Born in 1932 in the village of Tłukienka (now part of Bukowno), Olkusz County, Poland; died in 2018 in Brzeźnica near Bardo, Lower Silesia. His works have been presented in group exhibitions at the Zachęta – National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Selected solo exhibitions: • I Like Calm Women…, Kuyavian-Pomeranian Cultural Centre, Bydgoszcz, 2016; • Venus of Brzeźnica, Ethnographic Museum in Wrocław, 2015; • Women in the World of Bogdan Ziętek, Masovian Museum in Płock, 2010.