25/04—27/09/2026 “Neither Water Nor Earth” Curators: Anna Czaban, Krzysztof Gutfrański Artists: Zainab Aldehaimy, Roisin Agnew, Hoda Afshar, Centrala (Małgorzata Kuczyńska, Simone de Iacobis), Alia Farid, Katarzyna Hertz, Breda Lynch, Teresa Margolles, Philipp Modersohn, Vica Pacheco, Stach Szumski, Iza Tarasewicz, Zhang Xuzhan, Zorka Wolny, Glenda Zapata We invite you to the opening on 24/04/2026 at 19:00. During the opening, photographic and video documentation will be made. Work in the background — Alia Farid, “Chibayish” (2022), courtesy of the artist. Neither Water Nor Earth begins in a place where time does not flow linearly. It gets stuck. It thickens. It stays underfoot. In peatlands, low oxygen levels and acidic waters slow decay — bodies, textiles, seeds or wooden tools can survive for thousands of years. The bog becomes an unintended archive: it stores histories that were meant to be forgotten and holds them in an unsettling, damp present. What was supposed to disappear endures. Bodies recovered from bogs (bog bodies) often bear signs of ritual violence. Their stillness can be misleading: beneath the smooth surface of skin lie wounds, fractures, tightened ropes. The bog ceases to be a landscape and becomes a question about order and its cost: who was sacrificed — and why them? At the same time, these places have for centuries served other functions. They were hideouts for deserters, partisans, smugglers, fugitives — all those who had to disappear in order to survive. The hostility of the terrain could paradoxically also protect. This ambivalence returns today at the “green borders” — including on the Polish–Belarusian frontier — where forest and bog become corridors of death, and people are pushed back and forth, suspended between law and abandonment. Waterlogged ground acts both as shield and weapon: it conceals, slows, drags in, and hinders aid. For centuries bogs were drained in the name of hygiene, progress and safety. They were “wastelands” to be tamed. Today they reappear in a new guise of extractivism: as sites for military investments, and even places where water cools technological infrastructure — the hidden backbone of the digital economy. A landscape once deemed useless proves useful again. The exhibition engages threads stretched between geology, myth and contemporary politics, asking what happens when a landscape refuses to dry. In a world obsessively demanding hard borders, the bog proposes a different tempo: slower, saturated, stubborn. Sometimes it leaves only a mineral blue — vivianite — that covers bones, wet wood and what the bog preserves. Its hypnotic greenish‑blue hue becomes a discreet sign of the exhibition, a trace of the repressed. The artists treat the bog as a zone of anoxic time. It is a space that slows decay, preserves violence and dreams, while also unsettling what we consider “rational.”
