(No) Escape Room

U–jazdowski / Program / Project Room / {Project Room}... / (No) Escape Room

26/02—12/04/2026

exhibition

Apolonia Bokszycka

Apolonia Bokszycka’s exhibition uses the escape room format while simultaneously divesting it of the promise of resolution and exit that conventionally defines the genre. In place of a puzzle culminating in a decisive finale, it proposes a looped structure in which movement does not lead to closure. Such spatial organisation evokes the logic of the feed – a perceptual model based on perpetual sequentiality and the constant availability of successive stimuli. The exhibition unfolds according to a spiral dynamic: it escalates, intensifies, and overlays, while the viewer navigates it as a user traverses an information stream – reacting, executing tasks, and making decisions within circumscribed autonomy. Progression here is not synonymous with advancement; it may instead signify deeper immersion within the system.
- (No) Escape Room reveals the mechanisms of the attention economy that regulate concentration, reaction, and the duration of interaction. The exhibition space mirrors systems in which attention operates as a resource subject to management, modulation, and optimisation. The sequential structuring of experience is subordinated to an overarching imperative: the maintenance of engagement. Attention ceases to function as a means toward an external objective and becomes instead an end in itself – a variable capable of intensification, dispersion, and reactivation.
This mechanism situates the project within the broader condition of media overheating. The excess of visual and informational stimuli produces perceptual overload and an erosion of empathic capacity. Images of economic, climate, military, and geopolitical crises circulate through regimes of continuous updating; although transmitted in real time, they are apprehended fragmentarily, in the cadence of scrolling. Emotional exhaustion emerges here not as a thematic concern but as a necessary condition of experience. Transposed from the interface to the exhibition space, it materialises as one of its constitutive components.
- Gamification – found today in the organisation of labour, social relations, and platform economies – constitutes another operative model within the exhibition’s design. Tasks, sequences, and transitional thresholds generate an action-oriented experience that simulates a sense of participation without guaranteeing agency. What emerges is the mechanism of fake agency: the semblance of choice constrained by the parameters of a pre-scripted scenario. Movement, reaction, and decision coalesce into a chain of operations that proves difficult to interrupt, even when it yields neither solution nor cognitive closure.
Technology is approached not as an external instrument but as an intrinsic extension of corporeality. Technological extensions of the body – smartphones, watches, sensors, and screens – no longer merely augment perception but actively reorganise it. Each such extension entails a simultaneous amputation, as the intensification of one sensory channel occurs at the expense of others. In response to the hegemony of vision, (No) Escape Room deliberately shifts perceptual emphasis toward other modalities. Meaning is articulated through touch, sound, smell, and temperature, rendering it less susceptible to instantaneous consumption and more resistant to neutralisation.
- (No) Escape Room neither formulates an exit strategy nor indulges in nostalgic yearnings for a pre-screen reality. Instead, it establishes a field of confrontation with the body operating under conditions of overload and with attention as an ephemeral category, prone to management and exploitation. The possibility of escape remains suspended: is withdrawal conceivable when the game itself has ceased to be an exception and has instead become the dominant milieu structuring contemporary experience?
Marta Grytczuk