Sep 28 – Nov 18, 2023
Museum of the Earth
Pniewski's Villa
Aleja na Skarpie 27
Warsaw
Curator: Katarzyna Roj
Partners: BWA Wrocław, Museum of the Earth in Warsaw
Opening in the frame of Warsaw Gallery Weekend 2023
The worlds presented at the exhibition exist in parallel, but outside the boundaries of time. It is happening in Bohdan Pniewski’s villa, today the Museum of the Earth, formerly called the Villa on the Mount. The narrative of Otherworlds resembles ghosts – the genealogy of the place and its successive residents and users, among them architect Szymon Bogumił Zug, tsarist senator Nikolai Nikolaevich Novosiltsev, the Branicki and Pniewski families, the botanist Hanna Czeczott. Their symbolic presence is caused by the works of Anna Orłowska from the latest Silesian series Otherworlds, as well as several cycles from the past, presented together with minerals, iron pigments, and objects picked by the artist from the Museum of the Earth collection. Iron, as one of the components of hemoglobin transporting oxygen in the blood, played a decisive role in the development of life on earth. This element and the ghosts, as well as the villa’s architectural layers are the “main characters” of Otherworlds.
Anna Orłowska and the curator Katarzyna Roj use here an intuitive methodology, which they previously developed when creating the first presentation of Otherworlds in BWA Wrocław. Otherworlds is an appointed space in which the dead and their stories are located, thanks to recalling their existence by means of a collage of stories and artifacts. This time, Orłowska will call not only her ancestors, but also the spirits of her previous works [Whitewashing (2017), Futerał (2018), Pompier (2019), Flatlets (2020), Sankt Anna (2022)] through which she awakens the ghosts of Pniewski's villa.