Artists: Anna Siekierska, Kasia Hertz, Zofia nierodzińska
Curatorial concept: Zofia nierodzińska
Collaboration: Joanna Szumacher, Piotr Strzemieczny
Date: 24 October 2025–5 December 2025
Venue: WY Gallery, Łódź

Partner institution: Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz

Supported by: Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation and by the budget of the City of Łódź

Accompanying event: 8 November 2025 (Saturday) from 6 p.m.
Reading performance: Jens Soneryd
Discussion: ‘Naming the Forest: Forest as a Witness’: Susanne Prinz, Linda Soneryd, Jens Soneryd, Natalia Romik (remotely); moderator: Zofia nierodzińska

Guided tours:
25 October at 3 p.m. (with the artists)
8 November at 4 p.m. (with the curator), before the event

The exhibition "Kres" tells a story of borderlands, liminality and the uncertainty associated with them. It is a story of the exhaustion of the familiar and the settled. The forest, as a liminal space, blurs the boundaries between animal and human, domestic and migratory. The exhibition evokes borderline experiences through a choreography of steps and sounds, the proximity of history and the fear associated with it. However, it also depicts concrete gestures of empathy that can alter the course of events.

From the perspective of the West, which emerged as dominant in the Enlightenment era, Eastern Europe was depicted by travellers and intellectuals as a 'gloomy forest' (William Coxe), a region barely touched by human intervention. As Larry Wolf writes in his seminal work, "Inventing Eastern Europe" (1994), it is a geographical area with ever-shifting borders, sometimes extending as far as the Bug River, the Volga or the Urals. This geographical uncertainty makes the region vulnerable and subjected it to top-down definitions in the form of colonisation, occupation and/or extraction.

Those who are faced with adopting an Eastern European identity find themselves inhabiting borderlands, straddling the in-between, their existence is characterised by precariousness. However, the very essence of this identity contains the possibility of transgression. It is characterised by constant change and resistance to the authoritarian violence of binary thinking, which is unable to accept uncertainty. An anti-imperialist and progressive Eastern Europeaness employs the familiar tools of anti-hegemonic discourses.
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