The Last Castle. Polish Castleness: from Wawel to Stobnica Where: Palace under the Tin Roof, Royal Castle in Warsaw (entrance from the W‑Z Route) When: 26 March – 28 June 2026 Curator: Kuba Snopek There is an alarmingly large number of castles being built in Poland. Dozens are appearing across the country. Existing monuments are swelling. reconstruction follows reconstruction. New castles are also emerging where none existed before. These investments thrive despite criticism and huge costs. The exhibition examines the Polish love of the castle and treats the castle as a distinct typology at the intersection of architecture and communication. The original functions of the castle—fortress and residence—have long lost their raison d’être; what remains is the symbolic layer. A tension arises between the anachronism of the castle as an architectural object and its relevance as a means of communication. To investigate this, the project introduces the concept of “castleness”: the cultural perception of an object as a castle, based on collective imagination rather than its real history or authenticity. Seen from this perspective, Wawel, Tykocin, the Royal Castle, Stobnica and other castle‑like buildings stand in a row as equal manifestations of the same archetype. Deconstructing castleness helps to understand the relationship between the image of the castle consciously constructed by architects and the message sent by the castle-symbol. The exhibition focuses on the newest castles but demonstrates that the roots of their contemporary perception lie in the 19th century. It was then that the language of castleness we use today was formed: scale, mode of presentation, types of architectural costume, and the decision whether to leave a castle in ruins or restore it to newness. Because the modern image of Poland’s most important national symbols—Wawel and the Royal Castle in Warsaw—was shaped relatively recently, in the 20th century, they too draw on this language. The exhibition explores castleness through photography and contemporary art. Works on display include: Nicolas Grospierre: photographs of modernism, portraits of Wawel, Stobnica, the Royal Castle and Bobolice; Marta Ejsmont: photographic documentation of the construction of the Museum of Modern Art building, focused on the materiality of castles; Mateusz Pawlukiewicz: a visual lexicon of vernacular fortified architecture. The context is formed by models, infographics, fragments of architectural projects and drawings made by children. The exhibition’s climax is the installation The Last Castle created by the art‑curatorial collective Turnus and Mariia Kolomiitseva, in collaboration with artists: Zuzanna Bartoszek Wiktoria Kieniksman Ant Łakomsk Kuba Stępień Paweł Donhöffner Zięba The installation proposes a critical reworking of castleness: the artists reduce the castle to a recognizable archetype, stripping it of castleness attributes such as monumentality, permanence and semantic weight. They bring the castle down to a scale that can be confronted rather than admired from a distance. We invite you to encounter the exhibition, which allows looking at the castle from a new perspective and asking why it still exerts such a strong hold on our imagination.
