Scenography, painting, and…

In 2011, I was invited by the Kielce History Museum in my home town in Poland to have a large-scale individual retrospective exhibition. I was given four rooms (which I divided into a painting room, scenography room, "work in progress" room and a mini-cinema), and free hand to design it entirely according to my own imagination. My aim was to create something more engaging than just a set of pictures hanging on the wall so I used my experience in set design to turn the rooms into a memorable display space. This involved blacking out the windows in the painting room, and letting visitors peer into cardboard boxes in order to view the paintings; showing off the costumes by painting mannequins and surrounding areas in striking pink, and presenting theatre documentation on wheeled clothes racks; covering the floor with sketches and hanging them on a washing line in the “work in progress” space; and finally presenting videos projected onto two walls with accompanying musical soundtrack and a reconstructed costume from an old performance (a black dress, made entirely out of found materials). The exhibition was accompanied by a pop-up catalogue, whose form was devised by me, and the graphics layout was created in collaboration with illustrator Mateusz Stradomski. The result of this effort was that the exhibition was extended for a week because of the number of visitors that it attracted.