Zachęta Project Room

artists: Zofia Gramz / Lera Kelemen / Ana Kun / Janusz Łukowicz / Andreea Medar / Carmen Nicolau / Paulina Pankiewicz / Pusha Petrov & Miki Velciov / Anna Siekierska / Mikołaj Szpaczyński / Sorina Vazelina / Marta Węglińska
curators: Magda Kardasz & Diana Marincu
collaboration: Monika Kopczewska

The exhibition I Feel Something. Don’t Know What is a project created by the Art Encounters Foundation in Timişoara in collaboration with the Zachęta Project Room in Warsaw. Its aim is to generate a creative bridge between the artists who are active on the Timișoara art scene and the Polish artists who have participated in the exhibitions organised by our partner institution over the past few years. The first edition of the exhibition was held in Timișoara in April this year; the second will start in Warsaw in July.

The project presents a dialogue between works by a group of Romanian and Polish artists of the young and middle generation. This exhibition brings together six women artists and an artistic duo from Timișoara: Lera Kelemen, Ana Kun, Andreea Medar, Carmen Nicolau, Pusha Petrov & Miki Velciov, Sorina Vazelina, and six Polish artists: Zofia Gramz, Janusz Łukowicz, Paulina Pankiewicz, Anna Siekierska, Mikołaj Szpaczyński, Marta Węglińska. The exhibition is based on several interconnected thematic threads: the relationship between natural ecosystems and human intrusion; the imagining of hybrid anthropomorphic beings — extensions of the multiple facets of human existence; and the activist and ecological gestures of the artists with regard to the environment, the city, the public space and social changes. Therefore, the invited artists move towards structures based on self-organisation and collaboration, through which they detach from the existing systems. This is either achieved through the inspiration that is intuitively reached in nature and wilderness, or by developing a personal and collective conscience that is very mindful of the issues that currently define human existence in an exhausted anthropocentric environment.

The title of the exhibition — I Feel Something. Don’t Know What — was inspired by a drawing by Zofia Gramz and underlines the state of uncertainty that the planet itself communicates to us today, as well as the disconnection between the emotions and thoughts caused by a situation that often becomes absurd.