The exhibition Why not here? inaugurates the new gallery space in Warsaw - the birthplace of Wschód and the city which has so drastically changed within recent decades. The exhibition title prompts ever-more recurring questions on how to situate oneself within one’s surroundings. Can ‘here’ enforce a set boundary to one’s endeavor?
The pressing nature of this inquiry is coded in the ethos of our cultural program. Why not here? was a guiding thought behind choosing to expand the gallery’s presence to Cologne and New York. The notion of location, ephemeral or lasting, is not conclusive nor is it in any way limiting. Echoing the meditations of American art dealer David Kordansky, one may assume a more rewarding and curious approach to a site where artistic exchange takes place - The notion of location, location, location has never stuck with me. Do your artists make you a destination? That’s the question. Informed by each artist’s own contemporaneity and catalysed by the speculative nature of curatorial motif the exhibition invites us to leave a mark on the present, choose ‘here’ as the new beginning.
Executed specifically for the new location of Wschód, Interlacing (2025) springs from the very roots of the gallery space in Warsaw’s verdant Saska Kępa district. Karolina Bielawska (b. 1986) is a Warsaw-based artist, working with the medium of painting and sculpture. Her practice tends to signalize the inter-dependability between elements that surround us. Her new installation seizes the spirit of the symbiotic relationship between a fixed gallery site and a living, neighbouring nature. Here the gallery’s framework is extended so as to resonate more profoundly with the grounds on where it is standing. The seeming flourishing of hand-painted steel components, the very branches of Interlacing burgeoning from the prewar windows and entwining the architecture tenderly suggest the presence of an intricate organism of its own.
Frankfurt-based artist Cudelice Brazelton IV (b. 1991) works in installation, sculpture, painting, and assemblage. The relationship between cosmetic imagery and hardware lies at the forefront of Brazelton’s art and it is echoed through his techniques of tearing, reconstructing, piercing, and piecing together. His site specific work Tied in Scratches (2025) presented at the current exhibition investigates how meaning reveals itself upon insistence on tangible connections. An outline of a stick figure, somewhat of a skeleton receding into the wall, emitting knocking audio from its speaker pendant, suggests a presence of a ghost or an intruder might be at stake here. Executed in thread and PVC, combining assemblage with sound, the new work wraps itself along the hallway, inviting to look closer.
Jan Domicz (b. 1990) is a visual artist, author of videos and objects. His practice is centered around the narrative potential of both architectural and social space. Domicz is a graduate of the Städelschule Frankfurt am Main and his works were shown, among others, at the Architecture Biennale in Venice, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and SALTS in Basel. He displays a new work from the series Peoples, involving scaled figures from various photo documentations. Peoples (Krasiński made me do it) (2025) represents the artist himself at the entrance to the gallery, directing the gaze towards the interior.
Tbilisi-born Keta Gavasheli (b. 1990) is a visual artist and a graduate of Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where they studied under Dominique Gonzales-Foerster and Ellen Gallagher. Central to Gavasheli ́s practice is a profound understanding of the transformative nature of bodies and opening up boundaries which do not seem permeable at first. Her new works Untitled on display speak to the Memory Roll. The artist is fascinated by the interactions between everyday objects, imbuing them with symbolic meaning and transcending the boundaries of individual entities or images.
Raha Raissnia (b. 1968) is Teheran-born, New York City-based visual artist. Raissnia’s densely textured work draws in equal measure on the gestural and photographic, the figurative and abstract. Her films, drawings, and paintings are closely imbricated whilst her quasi-archeological approach results in aleatory forms and compositions that oscillate between abstraction and figuration. Three Untitled works on paper by Raissnia presented in the exhibition investigate that relationship of mutual influence and are guided by the materiality of their media, be it collage or sumi-ink. Raissnia engages with drawing as a way to revisit, question, and change the images we use to construct personal, cultural, and national identity.
