Chaos

The painting was part of the exhibition Krzyżówka at Suline Gallery, held within the FRINGE Warsaw Festival, 26–29 September 2024.
Artists: Zuzanna Skrętek, Marek Ruszczyński, Sara Ilia, Wiktor Gałka, Marta Bystroń, Michał Ostrowski, Zuzanna Grochowska, Zuzanna Woińska

Everyone has solved a crossword puzzle at least once in their life. It is one of those intellectual games whose rules are clear and easy to understand, yet the answers are not always straightforward. The artists selected for the exhibition represent diverse creative approaches and employ different modes of expression. Each artist had to work with a clue randomly assigned to them (as in a crossword) in order to guess the keyword and provide a visual response to it. The keywords share a common theme — they refer to issues of anxiety, touch upon concepts from alchemy, Slavic beliefs and culture, and were chosen based on Professor Jerzy Bralczyk’s book Strach się bać. The words are intended to provoke reflection on the appearance of contemporary reality and its representation in art. In this word-and-visual game, the artists draw from sources describing phenomena, beliefs, moods, and characters known for centuries, reinterpreting them into new representations according to their own intuition and imagination. It should be noted that this is not a simple process, as it might seem, and the randomly assigned keywords may push the artists into previously unexplored territories. This act of entering a new world, like many other unusual experiences, evokes the aforementioned anxiety, while also offering hope for change and the possibility of something better. Or perhaps it is only an illusion? Let us find out together by solving the crossword.

— Curator: Zuzanna Grochowska

The Krzyżówka project is part of FRINGE Warsaw 2024. The FRINGE community operates in independent spaces, pop-ups, and brings together projects emerging from small artistic communities. This year’s edition of FRINGE Warsaw was co-funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage through the Culture Promotion Fund.