Art for the End of the World

Galeria Arsenał in Białystok

The exhibition title, Art for the End of the World, situates this body of work in relation to crises that are increasingly entering public consciousness. Art created here and now, though motivated by many different impulses, can be read as a story about the end of the world understood as the breakdown of the existing order. It speaks of unpredictable consequences, mechanisms that have slipped out of control, and a pervasive sense of anxiety and disillusionment. Pandemic, war, and the migration and ecological crises form the everyday reality in which contemporary artistic practice is embedded. This collection allows for many possible readings, one of which unfolds in the context of Andrzej Marzec’s Antopocień and Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology.

In the introduction to the Polish edition of Morton’s Dark Ecology, Andrzej Marzec notes that the book leads us into three different kinds of darkness, each corresponding to a successive stage of ecological awareness. The first is associated with melancholy, gloom, and depression brought about by the destructive force of the climate crisis. The second kind of darkness emerges from the uncanniness of the beings inhabiting the Anthropocene, entities that are ambiguous, mysterious, and resistant to established categories. The third darkness takes the form of anarchic play, in which we relinquish the need to control others and abandon the search for obvious solutions.[1]

In the face of an uncertain future, art becomes both a form of testimony and a place of refuge. The exhibition Art for the End of the World presents a selection of works from the GaMA collection that grapple with crises of reality, relationships, and identity. The works on view reveal a wide range of strategies of resistance, from irony and defiance, through melancholy, to attempts to heal the relationship between humans and nature, as well as with themselves. From this perspective, the end of the world does not appear as a final catastrophe, but rather as a moment of transition, a turning point at which a new sensibility may emerge. The exhibition takes the form of a visual essay on the contemporary condition, suspended between disintegration and hope. Paintings, sculptures, and films assembled within the exhibition space examine the human condition in an era of excess, violence, and climate change. The oldest work included in the exhibition is Jarosław Kozłowski’s 1970 assemblage Absent. It can be read as an act of protest, a gesture of withdrawal from the art world, but also as a declaration of refusal to participate in a society whose thoughtless actions are leading toward catastrophe. A similar resonance can be found in Leszek Knaflewski’s video You Stand in My Place, in which the artist switches off a light bulb using a golf club. This gesture functions as a symbolic farewell, including a farewell to his own works, whose titles appear between shots. It is as if Knaflewski anticipated his premature departure and was saying: “the last one turns off the light; what remains after me will be an empty, dark space.” Monika Sosnowska’s Concrete sculptures depict spiders frozen in motion, remnants of our civilisation of steel and concrete. They are twisted and deformed, recalling fragments of modernist structures that have lost their original logic and functionality. In this way, the artist comments on the fragility of modernist utopias and on the belief that pure form and rational structure could produce a lasting, orderly world. The human figure Colosus, created by Przemysław Branas, is hollow inside and composed entirely of cardboard boxes from luxury fashion brands. It is precisely this industry that has become one of the main driving forces behind the ecological apocalypse. A commentary on this cardboard monument can be found in Radek Szlaga’s painting depicting a pig’s head, tellingly titled Kill Your Idol. In her ironic film Public Displays of Affection, which shows police officers conducting exercises in a small private apartment, Liliana Zeic draws attention to the consequences of fear and perceived threat produced by the institutions of the police state that we allow into our homes. The unsettling, neurotic paintings of Karolina Jabłońska, Martyna Czech, and Marta Bystroń present visions of an untamed, dangerous, and mysterious world, in which it becomes difficult to distinguish dreams from reality. Their works pulse with emotion, exposing inner tensions, anxieties, and uncertainty. By contrast, Tomasz Mróz’s sculpture, created during the COVID-19 pandemic, offers a caricatural image of human helplessness, with a head symbolically yet grotesquely weighed down by various burdens. Mróz’s work can also be read as a parody of contemplation in nature, where the pursuit of spiritual fulfilment gives way to a depressive vision of numbness and oppression.[2]

In his works, including Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World and Being Ecological, Timothy Morton develops the concept of hyperobjects: phenomena such as global warming, plastic pollution in the oceans, or radioactivity that are “distributed across time and space,” invisible or only partially accessible to human perception, yet exerting immense influence. Morton proposes an ontological model that challenges the classical distinction between subject (the human) and object (the world). All entities, human and non-human alike, are understood as equally valid objects capable of affecting one another. This perspective necessitates a fundamental rethinking of ethics, perception, and artistic practice. For Morton, art enables us to sense or visualise these vast systems and non-human agents that operate beyond our habitual modes of perception – hyperobjects. From this perspective, the exhibition suggests that the “end of the world” should not be understood solely as catastrophe, but rather as the gradual erosion of a reality long regarded as stable and secure. This reading aligns with Morton’s diagnosis that we already live in a post-anthropocentric world. The works presented in the exhibition reveal objects, relationships, and processes that exceed anthropocentric frameworks. In this sense, art becomes an “ecological” gesture in Morton’s understanding, not as a representation of nature, but as a mode of being in relation with the non-human. This approach is evident in the artistic practices of Piotr C. Kowalski’s Nienawiszcz series, in which the artist relinquishes control over image-making to natural forces, and in Diana Lelonek’s Zoe-therapy, where portraits of philosophers symbolising patriarchal wisdom are consumed by colonies of bacteria. Jarosław Kozakiewicz’s Horizontal Disturbance stages a confrontation between enlarged organic structures and the urban order of Poznań’s Old Town. Kozakiewicz constructs a dynamic superorganism governed by its own internal logic, one that overtakes and disrupts the city’s geometric grid. The object by the duo Inside Job (Ula Lucińska and Michał Knychaus) draws on post-apocalyptic aesthetics, treating them as a space for reflection on contemporary social and existential tensions. Its title, Get Down, Get Down Little Henry Lee and Stay All Night with Me, is taken from the refrain of a traditional English folk song. The ballad tells the story of a man who rejects a former lover, who, driven by jealousy, murders him and conceals his body. The most widely known contemporary version of this dark narrative is Nick Cave and P. J. Harvey’s Henry Lee from the album Murder Ballads (1996). Dominika Olszowy’s A Keepsake for Ossowiecki draws on the aesthetic of television fortune-tellers who skilfully extract money from naïve viewers by offering alluring visions of the future. This phenomenon can be read as a symptom of contemporary society’s slide into a new, post-technological Middle Ages, in which rational decision-making gives way to emotions, intuition, and premonition.

In his book Antropocień. Filozofia i estetyka po końcu świata (2021), Andrzej Marzec uses the titular concept to describe an era in which the human has ceased to function as the sole centre of meaning and agency. He emphasises that the Anthropocene is not only a geological or climatic issue, but also a philosophical and aesthetic one. Art, culture, and thought must therefore take into account the post-human condition, multispecies coexistence, relationality, and responsibility toward other forms of being. Art for the End of the World proposes a deconstruction of the anthropocentric gaze. Art shifts toward what comes “after the human,” or toward forms of coexistence between human and non-human actors. The titular “end of the world” may thus be understood as the end of a particular mode of human dominance and the beginning of a different order, one in which the human is only one of many agents, rather than the sole master of the world.

The exhibition also invites us to ask what forms of art are adequate to the time in which we live, the end of one era and the beginning of another. Izabella Gustowska’s film, made in 1979, is a spontaneous manifesto of the sisterly duality of twins. It presents a vision of intuitive, wordless communication, pointing to the possibility of relationships grounded in curiosity and trust. Created more than forty years later, Ola Winnicka’s music video Siory also engages with the idea of sisterhood, this time situated within a broader urban context. In both works, choreography plays a central role, as the figures express their emotions through distinct gestures and movements. Bringing the exhibition to a close, Marysia Lewandowska’s Dismantling the Faculty of Law searches for a voice of hope within the empty halls of the Collegium Iuridicum in Poznań. Perhaps the theory of kindness formulated many years ago by Czesław Znamierowski offers one way of mitigating the effects of overlapping crises. Znamierowski argued that human beings are inherently social, and that the foundation of morality should be kindness, understood not as emotional affection but as a conscious, sustained commitment to the good of others and to avoiding harm. Kindness, in this sense, forms the basis of social coexistence, enabling communities to function harmoniously. Moral norms acquire meaning only within the context of interpersonal relations and serve to sustain a shared social order. Znamierowski sought to develop a scientific ethics free from religious assumptions, grounded instead in reason and social experience.

The question of what art for the end of the world can be, or should be, may be answered paradoxically, following Jerzy Ludwiński: “it can be anything.” Art for the end of the world, or perhaps art at the end of the world, holds the potential to free itself from constraints imposed, among other things, by an anthropocentric way of seeing. It does not need to rely on a single, fixed interpretation, but can instead embrace what is indeterminate and elusive. The works presented in the gallery resist exhaustive reading; they always leave room for intuition and emotion, for individual interpretation. Rather than offering definitive answers, the exhibition encourages a multidimensional and empathetic mode of looking.

curator: Marek Wasilewski