Opening reception: Wednesday, Sep 10, 2025, 5:00 - 9:00 PM
5:00 PM Preview
6:00 PM Art talk with Anna Barlik and Marlena Kudlicka
7:30-9:00 PM Reception
In the hidden museal archives you might find early interviews with artists who understood that materiality itself could be a form of resistance. This sensibility—the belief that physical form carries its own intelligence and capacity for critique—animates the extraordinary gathering of four Polish artists at Nguyen Wahed Gallery in fall 2025. What unfolds across the gallery is not merely an exhibition but a kind of material philosophy in action: a proposition about how objects think, and how thinking becomes object.
There is something deliberately unorthodox about encountering Marlena Kudlicka’s powder-coated steel in the same breath as Magdalena Abakanowicz’s haunting bodies. At Nguyen Wahed Gallery, in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute New York, these four artists—Kudlicka, Barlik, Abakanowicz, and Kurant—stage a dialogue that feels less like a national grouping and more like a conspiracy of forms against the smooth surfaces of our contemporary moment.
For Anna Barlik, this exhibition marks a crucial point in an investigation in spatial politics of form and perception, that has moved through some of Poland’s most significant institutions. Her Datament at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art last year proposed a radical rethinking of data as material, offering chromatic, site-responsive interventions that challenged the neutrality of architecture. Her contribution to the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2023), in collaboration with curator Jacek Sosnowski, placed her sculptures in conversation with architectural space itself and explored the human–space relationship. The works she brings to New York, fresh from her Art Omi residency in upstate New York, continue and expand these institutional conversations in Connections (2025), translating coded information into color and form Barlik creates a transatlantic dialogue about how we inhabit and transform space, how systems structure our environments and how artistic gestures can interrupt, reframe, or resist those structures.
Standing before Marlena Kudlicka’s two new sculptures, Black Discrete 00 and Black Discrete 01 (2025), one recalls mathematical functions—that for any given “x” there can be only one “y.” Kudlicka rejects this certainty. Created specifically for this exhibition, these two powder-coated steel sister forms rooted in architectural logic and mathematical grammar that seem to oscillate between calculation and interruption. Structural diagrams, yet each is intentionally misaligned, introducing delicate errors into systems of precision and order, presence and erasure, positive and negative forms, catching light in ways that suggest communication protocols gone beautifully awry. Kudlicka often collaborates with engineers and architects, translating the rigor of industrial materials into spatial poetry. Here, light and shadow activate the forms like phantom equations with shimmering beautiful glitches. “Work productivity, efficiency,” are her stated subjects, yet what emerges reads as a love letter to the gap between perfection and its necessary deviation.
Special Presentation: Magdalena Abakanowicz, Butoh - Dance - Sculpture (1995)
Video documentation, never previously exhibited outside Poland
On view is the first international exhibition of the film documentation from Butoh - Dance - Sculpture (1995): a recording of excerpts choreographed by Magdalena Abakanowicz and performed by the Tokyo-based Butoh troupe Asbestos (from "ankoku butō" - dance of darkness) an avant-garde form of post-World War II Japanese dance theatre, directed by itsco-founder, Akiko Motofuji. The choreography draws from Abakanowicz’s sculptural series Backs, Embryology, Seated Figures, and Mutants, works she collectively titled Alterations. The dance transforms the sculptures’ static nature into mobility, hence Abakanowicz’s original subtitle, Alteration of Alterations. Butoh - Dance - Sculpture was an open-air collaboration between Motofuji and Abakanowicz performed in Poland in conjunction with the Warsaw opening, dances by Motofuji and a group of male butoh performers, accompanied by bassist Tetsu Saito and two kotos, a requiem-like offering in a country marked by a tragic history. Staged in Agrykola Park, near Ujazdowski Castle, the performance accompanied the opening of her exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CSW) in Warsaw on September 22–23, 1995.
Contextually, Dancing Figure is among Abakanowicz’s most dynamic sculptural types; when arranged in a circle and holding hands, the figures evoke the slender silhouettes swirling through Matisse’s Dance. After installing Space of Becalmed Beings (1992–93) in Hiroshima, Abakanowicz received a recording of a butoh group improvising around her sculptures. Moved by the tribute but dissatisfied with the result, she collaborated directly with Motofuji, producing drawings that the troupe translated into choreography that in 1995, the Japanese group presented at the CSW opening.
September 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of these Warsaw performances (September 22–23, 1995); this first presentation of the film outside Poland honors that milestone.
Abakanowicz’s headless figures, products of the 1970s and ’80s, carry the weight of Communist-era anonymity, the Eastern European experience of being hypervisible to the state yet invisible as an individual. Positioned near Kurant’s Sentimentite, with its crystallized collective emotions rendered in synthetic minerals, we witness a conversation about giving form to the formless pressures of systemic control, mining the invisible architectures of digital governance to produce artifacts from a future already here.
Agnieszka Kurant’s Sentimentite (2022) gives material form to intangible data by transforming aggregated emotional responses into a speculative geological artifact. Created with computational scientists, the work analyzes sentiment data scraped from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to global events like the COVID-19 lockdown or the oil price crash of 2020. These data are minted as NFTs, which dynamically evolve in digital space and can be later cast into physical sculptures using acrylic resin and pulverized materials. The result is “Sentimentite”—a fictional mineral that appears natural but is rooted in invisible digital architectures. Kurant thereby critiques algorithmic capitalism and renders visible the affective labor encoded in our collective emotional landscapes.
What strikes most forcefully is how these four artists refuse clean boundaries between digital and physical, conceptual and material. Kudlicka’s mathematical precision bleeds into Barlik’s architectural interventions. Abakanowicz’s brutal physicality finds echo in Agnieszka Kurant’s data-driven mineralogy. It is as if they are all working on the same issue from different angles: how to make the invisible visible, how to give weight to weightlessness, how to assert the stubborn fact of material presence in an increasingly dematerialized world.
This exhibition is co-organized and co-produced with the Polish Cultural Institute New York, and supported by Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland, and is part of PCI’s 25th anniversary celebration.
