Acrylic on canvas, polyester resin, epoxy resin, wooden table and bed, cotton bedding,
218 x 467 x 340 cm
BIRDS SPEAK POLISH
2025
The diorama’s absurd yet charming title was drawn from an old children’s book that introduced its youngest readers to national myths and collective imagination through various bird species that tell stories about different regions of Poland.
Excerpt from the curatorial text by Katarzyna Różniak-Szabelska:
„Giewont, the symbolic mountain whose silhouette seen from Zakopane has long been likened to the figure of a sleeping knight, returns as a motif in the recent works of Alicja Pakosz. The artist explores the notion of banal nationalism, tracing the unnoticed and normalized national symbols woven into everyday life. She seeks them above all in culturally ingrained ways of depicting the landscape.
For her exhibition at Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, Pakosz has created a large-scale diorama portraying a domestic interior.
A life-sized Giewont lies beneath a duvet in an ordinary pine-framed bed. Through a ruptured wall, the landscape presses into the room, bringing with it a sense of structural collapse. The wind blows, curtains billow. At the heart of this scene stand pollarded willows, reminiscent both of Young Poland paintings by Jacek Malczewski and of Józef Chełmoński’s visions of native landscapes. A woman in pyjamas tiptoes across the floor, trying not to wake her guardian.
The sleeping Giewont, perhaps a husband or partner, clutches a knife in his hand. Once roused, he will give shape to the nationalist fantasy of violence enacted in the name of, and in defence of, the nation. Pakosz suggests that no matter how strained one’s relationship with national identity may be, it remains impossible to imagine life outside of it. In this respect, it resembles a toxic relationship.
By working with the medium of the diorama, the artist references both the nineteenth-century tradition of natural history displays, showing taxidermied animals against painted backdrops of their habitats, and the twentieth-century history of national exhibitions.
These exhibitions were designed to construct iconic images of modern nations, often through elaborate moving stage sets and, at times, even re-enactments with extras tending sheep. Because European landscapes tended to look rather similar, each nation had to distinguish itself through selective differentiation.
In Poland, the iconic landscape became associated with the pastoral idyll, birch and linden trees, willows, and birds. Historical dioramas rooted in national narratives conveyed stories situated at the intersection of personal experience and sweeping geopolitical processes. Pakosz appropriates these strategies in a deliberately subversive way. Her narrative, staged within a haunted domestic interior, personal, tense, and infused with dark humour, both undermines and complicates traditional national narratives.”
REPORTER
2023
A man is submerged in a puddle of mud or a sinkhole. Only the top of his head and his right hand are sticking out to the surface. Similar to a reporter broadcasting from another country, he sees something underwater and tries to convey it to the people on the surface by drawing in mud with a stick -- the subject of his drawing: a fertile, gentle, idyllic landscape. Unbeknownst to him, however, his message becomes disrupted by his own hair also forming a landscape, but a mountainous and a rocky one. Despite his best intentions, he unknowingly sends a double, contradictory message.
Cardboard box, styrofoam, pcv glue, putty, foamiran, paint
160 x 100 x 140 cm
MONUMENT TO AN UNKNOWN EMPLOYEE
2022
In the movies, laid-off employees pack their personal items from the desk into a cardboard box before leaving the workplace. Sometimes this is a joyous moment (like Peggy Olson in Mad Man) - a symbolic beginning of a new and better chapter in life. Sometimes it's the apathetic exit of a person who loses their only source of income or questions the meaning of wasted years.
The enlarged cardboard box functions as a monument that weeps with the petals of a flower. The objects filling it are an imitation, the bottom is false and as a result this monument is half filled with emptiness.
Styrofoam, pcv glue, putty, epoxy, paint, projection
200 x 100 x 83 cm
CEROMANCY
2022
A huge hand is engaged in wax divination. The rules are simple: the person doing the divination pours wax on water through the keyhole. Then, while illuminating the shape created, one interprets its shadow, trying to find clues about the future. Usually one looks for information regarding love, career or health.
Here, this person does not have the necessary mental tools to read the message. He or she sees something other than what the wax suggests. Instead of casting its own shadow, the wax casts an image of an ancient catastrophe. The vision of the dinosaurs just before the meteorites hit, nonetheless, is as imaginary as any possible image of the future.
Plywood board, styrofoam, styrodur, soil, epoxy resin, plants) standing on a steel frame
2 pieces, each 110 x 60 x 70 cm
PUDDLE
2021
A useful metaphor is provided here by the Dead Marshes - a location from The Lord of the Rings. The protagonists see perfectly preserved bodies of people who fought and died in a great battle a long long time ago. This is what it looks like from the outside. After falling into the water, it turns out that there are no bodies there, only green ghostly phantoms.
The preserved image of the victims of the battle points to the topics of memory and history. However, it is impossible to talk about a true, objective history. Taking into account every moment in the life of all people from a given period is impossible. Therefore, when we bring about the subject, we irreversibly end up with an image of history.
Pinocchio is a picture of history that protrudes from under the water. It interferes with our reality through his nose and a single fingernail. In addition to the agent operating from under the water, there is a second agent hidden in the object - a magician who performs a trick of sawing a woman in half. The magician manipulates not only the image of history, which is visible from outside, but also its ghostly, underwater roots.
Linoleum, styrofoam, artificial grass, sand, human figurines, artificial plants
150 × 260 × 200 cm
A MONUMENT OF NOT GETTING NOTICED
2020
Located in a barren landscape, a big hand gestures seeking teacher's permission to use the toilet. Ignored, it is resorted to stand in a puddle of urine, a desert monument of those unheard.
Linoleum, styrofoam, artificial grass, cardboard tubes.
130 × 350 × 227 cm
MACHINE
2020
The vehicle once set in motion has now vanished, its only remainder - a set of wheels that clung to the ground. The vehicle here is understood as an idea, the reflection of which is cast on actual human institutions, examples of such connections being God-Church, Art-Museum, Love-Marriage. The disappearance of the machine leaves an institutional shell that can continue to exist hollowly or be taken over by a new operating system.
Soil, styrofoam, artificial grass.
200 × 60 × 50 cm
GNOMON
2020
A statue knocked off its pedestal and buried underground has a gigantic erection. Its tip protrudes above the surface of the ground and is used there as a gnomon - the simplest kind of clock.
Gnomon, acrylic on paper, 42 x 29,7 cm
