EXHIBITION: HOME ACTIVITIES | ALEKSANDRA KUBIAK
OPENING: 13/11/2026, 18.00
Curator: Marek Wasilewski
Aleksandra Kubiak’s exhibition Home activities focuses on the notion of home, understood not only as a physical space, but also as an emotional state, a community, memory, and the body. The artist explores the ways in which home is constructed through everyday experiences, such as being embraced receiving warmth, the rhythm of rocking, and building relationships. These concepts, interwoven with categories of knowledge and architecture, form a map of intimate meanings in which the private intersects with the social and the political. The film A Home to Carry, created especially for the Poznań exhibition, is an attempt to capture what is conveyed not only through storytelling, but also through the body, emotions, and gestures.
Kubiak constructs her home through gestures of reduction rather than accumulation. A home to carry can contain only that which fundamentally constitutes the idea of home. In her new film, the artist reflects on what home is as a physical, emotional, and genetic space, demonstrating how we carry it within us, even when we can no longer build it. The film is also a road movie: a record of a walking journey, of moments of fatigue, of slowly traversing the landscape, and of the effort required to push a heavy object symbolising a home from the artist’s studio in Zielona Góra to the gallery in Poznań. This seemingly irrational gesture restores meaning to everything that has lost its value in today’s fast-paced culture and sits somewhere between fantasy and reality. It manifests the dream of having a place of one’s own, yet simultaneously serves as a reminder that such a place may be lost, abandoned, or relocated. After all, a home can be built, but it can also be destroyed. One may not have a home, one may remember it, one may try to take it with them. It therefore comes as no surprise that people encountered along the way perceived the wandering artist as someone who was homeless or crazy. In this context, the effort does not lead to a goal in the simplest sense, but rather becomes the meaning in itself. The time it takes to cover the distance, the weight of the object, the physical exhaustion – all of this is an integral part of the artistic act. Home is no longer an image – it is a burden that must be carried, dragged, or pushed.
The focal point of the exhibition, the installation A Home to Carry. 1–64, consists of sixty-four small plaster bricks arranged on a wooden pallet. The bricks constitute the imagined building material of a private space – a home that can be assembled, dismantled, and carried away. The significance of the exhibition Home activities oscillates between the private and the public, between a gesture of care and the need to belong. It is an attempt to understand home as a dynamic, fragile structure that we are continually building within ourselves, between ourselves, and in relation to the world.
An integral part of the exhibition is the accompanying volume of texts written by the artist over the years alongside her successive projects. The artist has chosen to bring them together in a single publication, although from the outset they were not intended solely for reading, but also to be heard during her performances. Written in the first person, they resemble a confessional account or inner monologue that allows the artist to define her place in the world, gather strength, and organise her thoughts. The result is an extremely direct, realistic record, devoid of literary affectation, yet powerful precisely because of its uncompromising energy. These texts are multi‑layered, yet they never lack clarity. Their power stems from the precision of their observation of both reality and the author’s own emotional states. They can be regarded as a stream of consciousness: a sequence of thoughts, recalled images, memories, and sudden associations. Kubiak’s texts are not just a record of personal experience. Like the entire exhibition, they become a space in which the private meets the shared: memory, experience, fear, the body, family, history, and the need for intimacy. The exhibition also explores the search for family roots, a return to familial microhistories, and to dramatic experiences from the past that continue to influence subsequent generations.
The exhibition, therefore, does not present the image of home as a stable order. Here, home is more a question. It is something we try to construct, to move, to reclaim, or sometimes merely to imagine. Perhaps this is why movement becomes its most significant form: the journey, the body, the voice, memory, and work carried out despite the apparent lack of a practical reason. Home does not have to be a place to which one can return. Sometimes, it is what we carry with us.
Marek Wasilewski