Zuzanna Srebrna
Axis mundi
Zuzanna Srebrna's exhibition is the fourth instalment in the 22/23 {Project Room} series, as part of which young artists are given the opportunity to present their work in an individual exhibition at one of the most important contemporary art institutions in Poland.
The series was inaugurated in October 2022 with Konrad Dobrucki's exhibition, Warstwy [Layers]. This was followed by an exhibition by Daniel Dąbrowski and Jagoda Stączek. In the 2022/2023 edition of Project Room, we will still present the work of Tarta Collective and Agata Żołądź-Yolik Nal.
Following an open call, participating artists were selected by a jury consisting of: Krystyna Różańska-Gorgolewska, curator at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (chairperson); Stanisław Brach, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw; Rafał Łubowski, professor at the University of Arts in Poznań; and Grzegorz Wnęk, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków.
Zuzanna Srebrna
(b. 1985) is an artist working at the intersection of scenography, sculpture, and installation. She has designed sets and costumes for over thirty performances presented at festivals in Europe and Asia. When creating exhibitions and installations, she experiments with space on a micro and macro scale. The starting points for her works are the human body, performative action, and the city understood as a living organism.
In her collaborations with puppet, drama and opera theatres and working in non-theatrical spaces - creating performances, installations and urban games - she explores the significance of the object, puppet, actor, costume, prop, and multimedia. She engages with the audience, inviting them to cross the threshold between the stage and the auditorium, in order to become part of the space created by the artist and to experience it with all their senses.
The artist draws attention to the significance of non-verbal communication, the power of imagination, the interpretation of meanings, and metaphysical experiences. She is interested in constructing worlds suspended between reality and unreality, dream and waking, life and death. She seeks a form that would reflect these states, and sees the role of the artist as a mediator between these worlds as significant.
The exhibition presented in the Project Room of Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art is part of her doctoral thesis.
The author of the exhibition’s sound design is Bartłomiej Zajkowski – a composer, pianist, and the author of the first electronic rendition of Chopin's 24 preludes, Op. 28. As a composer, he creates both symphonic and chamber forms and combines electronic media with classical instruments. He has also written film and theatre music.
