Events
“selfworldbuilding” – exhibition opening, exhibition
18 September – 28 October 2026, BWA Katowice, former Sculpture Gallery
exhibition opening: Friday, 18 September 2026, 17:30
After the opening, we invite you to Kino Światowid, where at 18:30 the Silesian premiere of Łukasz Ronduda’s film “Tell Me What You Feel” will take place, followed by a meeting with the filmmakers.
artists
Kinga Burek-Domżalska,
Basia Cabaj,
Radosław Chorab,
Marta Nadolle,
Ewa Nowik,
Julia Poziomecka,
Patryk Różycki,
Kuba Stępień
curator – Jessica Kufa, in collaboration with Bartosz Kos and Łukasz Trzciński
Never before have we been at a moment when the identity of the individual and the question of its construction have been so present in public discourse as they are today. Perspectives of “self-” are multiplying across a wide range of fields — artistic, literary and scientific. This turn towards the self is by no means a matter of narcissism, but rather of a vivid interest in the world, the multiplication of questions and the continuous retuning of oneself as an apparatus for experiencing multiple perspectives on how reality can be understood. These perspectives are constructed through the particular situatedness of each of us in the world. This means that we begin the act of cognition by recognising the conditions in which our identity takes shape, because it influences the very outcome of our thinking about the world. Retuning is an act that transforms both ourselves and the way we operate in the world.
The exhibition emerges in the context of the transformation of the art institution — the multi-year “Kongres Estetyczny” programme updates the gallery’s formula through the engagement of artistic languages. The direct subject of the artistic activities and curatorial reflection is BWA Katowice — an institution established in 1949 as a tool of social engineering. In the 1990s and the first decades of the 21st century, however, it became a victim of a transformation policy that subjected public assets to market forces. Echoes of those years resonate throughout the exhibition as the childhood period — an important motif in autofiction — of the artists invited to present their work.
The methods of autofiction employed in the paintings on display play with modes of reception focused on non-fiction. Instead of “true stories”, situations that could potentially have happened are narrated. Their aim is to create mythologies of initiation, to reformulate and transform the conditions through which we think about the world, and to deconstruct identity. What is at stake is not establishing what really happened, but creating a laboratory of stories that expand our understanding. Drawing on this, let us ask: what are the autofictions of an institution?
The exhibition, limited to the medium of painting, whose narrative thread is formed by works functioning as tools in the artists’ processes of self-therapy, subversively annexes the space of the former Sculpture Gallery — reopened to art after almost 30 years of commercial tenancy.
We invite you to an art institution in the process of transformation. Every hole in the wall is potentially a work of art.
