The riverside pavilions become a space for intervention in the urban fabric and an attempt to answer the question: if the threat is so clear, why do we continue to act according to patterns that deepen the crisis? The exhibition’s narrative begins with water and local ecosystems, moves through global flows of raw materials, and traces the mechanisms of production and exploitation connected to them. The exhibition invites reflection on the nature of the environment and the finite nature of its resources.
The site-specific installations were created by four artistic collectives. Their collaboration highlights the importance of collective action in the face of growing uncertainty and changing living conditions. Collectivity also becomes a tool for critiquing a system based on individualism.
Everything Will Change is the first presentation in the “Resources” exhibition programme, devoted to the exploitation of natural resources and its irreversible consequences.
Location: Gen. George Smith Patton Boulevard, Warsaw (Google Maps).
INSTALLATIONS
HYDROZA: Jagoda Malanin, Kasia Rysiak, Milena Soporowska, Kasia Ślesińska
They Have a Muscle That Loves Being Alive
The artists behind the installation focus on the relationships between water, matter, and processes of environmental degradation. The work takes mussels used as bioindicators of water quality as its point of reference; their responses to pollutants become a clear signal of the state of the environment. The depiction of a dried-up fountain refers to the cyclical nature of natural processes and the tension between how they actually function and human notions of control and stability.
GRUPA ZAKOLE: Zuzia Derlacz, Krysia Jędrzejewska-Szmek, Aleksandra Knychalska, Olga Roszkowska, Pola Salicka
Two and a Half Metres of Marsh
The pavilion is devoted to the history of Zakole Wawerskie, a wetland ecosystem in Warsaw’s Wawer district, cut off from the former course of the Vistula but still shaped by the river. It is a place where environmental history overlaps with contemporary processes of urbanisation, agriculture, and infrastructure development, creating a tension between the wild and the transformed. The area is treated as a space of landscape memory, bearing traces of changes that have taken place over centuries while also raising questions about the role of the city in the long history of this ecosystem.
SEN O KOŃCU: Kinga Dobosz, Maja Janczar, Piotr Mlącki, Tomek Paszkowicz
Import/Import/Import
The installation explores the industrial consumption of resources and their presence in everyday systems of exchange and distribution. Its form references the popular parcel locker systems. The goods that are continuously produced embody not only practical value, but also intellectual and symbolic value. Their excess generates significant environmental costs, while the production system reveals postcolonial relations. The installation reflects on how the widespread availability of goods and the ways in which they are distributed transform both ourselves and culture.
PIOTROWSKA/SZCZĘŚNIAK: Sara Piotrowska, Maciej Szczęśniak
Moving forward
At the centre of the project is river sand, a basic resource used in the construction industry. Desert sand, shaped by the wind, is too smooth and rounded to bind concrete effectively. For this reason, Dubai, in building its spectacular infrastructure, has been forced to import sand, including from Australia. The installation explores the intensive exploitation of this resource, drawing attention to the network of global connections and the environmental consequences it entails.
ARTISTIC COLLECTIVES
Hydroza is a collective of visual artists whose practice grew out of photography. It consists of Jagoda Malanin, Kasia Rysiak, Milena Soporowska, and Kasia Ślesińska. The artists work with texts by contemporary feminist researchers and theorists, translating them into artistic practice. The starting point for the collective’s first project was Astrida Neimanis’s manifesto Hydrofeminizm, czyli stawanie się ciałem wodnym. Hydroza’s debut series, Kto będzie płakał ostatni?, focused on the ambivalent nature of water as a source of life, memory, violence, and oppression. The project was presented in various iterations at Pracownia Wschodnia (Warsaw, 2023), DOMIE (Poznań, 2023), and Biuro Wystaw (Warsaw, 2024) as part of the exhibition Znak wodny (curated by Paweł Brylski and Kwiaciarnia Grafiki), and, in a concluding form, at Galeria u Agatki (Wrocław, 2024).
In 2023, the collective was invited to participate in Narracje, the oldest multimedia and site-specific installation festival in Gdańsk. The artists’ performance was presented to the public in November 2024 during the festival’s 15th edition, held in Gdańsk’s Niedźwiednik district. That same month, Hydroza also participated in the ART & DESIGN 2024 exhibition Water Life in Łódź.
The collective’s next project, Perpetua, inspired by Silvia Federici’s text Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, was presented in September 2025 at GUA in Wrocław. In November of the same year, Hydroza was invited by IKM Wrocław to participate in the Sztuka sąsiedztwa project.
Grupa ZAKOLE was established in 2020 as part of the EU-funded MediaActivism project, run in Poland by Krytyka Polityczna. Since the project ended, ZAKOLE has operated as an independent collective practice. The group was originally formed by Ola Knychalska, Zuzia Derlacz, Olga Roszkowska, Krysia Jędrzejewska-Szmek, and Igor Stokfiszewski. Pola Salicka joined in 2021.
ZAKOLE is a project rooted in the wetlands located not far from the heart of Warsaw. Zakole Wawerskie encompasses both a picturesque, mostly inaccessible marsh and extensive meadows. The area is inhabited by a variety of beings – beavers, birds, frogs, mosquitoes, alder forests, reeds, grasses, and humans. Our aim is to get to know Zakole Wawerskie together with its inhabitants and visitors, as well as to identify and map its different meanings. As part of ZAKOLE, we explore ways of telling stories about and experiencing places of this kind, while bringing the perspectives of the beings that co-create them into focus. We want to emphasise the importance of such places within cities, particularly for ecological and climate-related reasons, while also drawing attention to the complexity of the relationships and interests of the various actors connected to them.
To get to know Zakole Wawerskie better, we developed various observational methods to help us draw closer to the Zakole ecosystem. We organised small-scale gatherings that provided an opportunity to exchange experiences, information, and reflections on Zakole and similar places. They also offered an opportunity to consider our ability to understand other organisms and the networks of interdependence they create. We also explored this question during experimental walks with a group of artists and biologists, practising attentiveness and empathy towards non-human beings.
The activities carried out as part of ZAKOLE provide an opportunity to produce and exchange different forms of knowledge – historical and scientific, as well as personal, embodied, and rooted in sensory experience. We also collect information on administrative proceedings concerning Zakole Wawerskie and potential scenarios for the area’s future, continually asking ourselves how to think about the right to the city while including more-than-human beings. We collect the knowledge we produce on the continuously expanding website www.zakole.pl. ZAKOLE is an open project: we seek broad alliances and cooperation with people and organisations interested in the future of Zakole Wawerskie, as well as in developing new language and tools for understanding the area. We hope that these activities will lead to the formation of a community committed to caring for this place.
Sen o Końcu is a collective formed by Kinga Dobosz, Maja Janczar, Piotr Mlącki, and Tomek Paszkowicz. As part of their practice, they develop artistic and curatorial projects, exploring alternative narratives, visual forms, and modes of exhibition.
The collective has organised exhibitions in abandoned factories, flooded basements, and old tenement buildings, as well as as part of the Otwarty Jazdów programme (2022), at the Gierowski Foundation (2024), Crash Club (2024), and during FRINGE Warszawa (2024/2025). In 2025, Sen o Końcu also took part in a residency at the Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art.
Piotrowska/Szczęśniak. Sara Piotrowska (1989) and Maciej Szczęśniak (1989) – visual artists, alleged cousins, anthroposceptics. They hold degrees in Cultural Studies (BA, Jagiellonian University), Intermedia (BA, Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow), Media Art (MA, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw), and completed doctoral studies at the KEN University in Krakow. Academics with a penchant for methodological guerrilla tactics, they work primarily site-specific, conducting long-term case studies. They work with objects, installations, performance, text, and process. Their projects take the form of multi-element monographs – constantly evolving collections of findings and questions.
They have been collaborating since 2015, after discovering a shared affinity in both interests and blood. Since 2019, they have jointly run the artist-run space Piotrowska/Szczęśniak Atelier. They live and work in Krakow and Warsaw.
Marta Matysiak – curator and interdisciplinary artist. She graduated from the Faculty of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She is a member of the Przyszła Niedoszła collective and co-founder of the FRINGE Warszawa initiative. Her practice focuses on socially engaged art, primarily from feminist and emancipatory perspectives. She has developed artistic and curatorial projects at, among others, the Stefan Gierowski Foundation, Galeria Promocyjna, Studio Theatre, Galeria Labirynt, and Galeria Salon Akademii. She co-founded the grassroots art gallery Przyszła Niedoszła, which operated in Warsaw’s Praga-Północ district from 2021 to 2024. At the National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw, she oversees consistent communication with the public.
Director of the National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw: Dr Magdalena Wróblewska
Curator / Texts: Marta Matysiak
Collectives:
Grupa Zakole – Zuzia Derlacz, Krysia Jędrzejewska-Szmek, Aleksandra Knychalska, Olga Roszkowska, Pola Salicka
Hydroza – Jagoda Malanin, Kasia Rysiak, Milena Soporowska, Kasia Ślesińska
Piotrowska/Szczęśniak – Sara Piotrowska, Maciej Szczęśniak
Sen o Końcu – Kinga Dobosz, Maja Janczar, Piotr Mlącki, Tomek Paszkowicz
Visual Identity / Graphic Design and Typesetting: Patrycja Lewandowska
Project Coordination:
PME – Łukasz Gackowski, Kamila Smakulska
Dzielnica Wisła – Weronika Czyżycka, Jan Piotrowski
Accessibility: Ewelina Pagieła, Emilia Szuchniewicz, Wielozmysły, Justyna Zieniuk
Accompanying Programme: Justyna Dominiak, Julia Grudzień, Zofia Herman-Templewicz, Maria Lewandowska, Joanna Migut, Luxuan Wang, Maria Wodzińska
PR and Communications: Łukasz Gackowski, Patrycja Lewandowska, Marta Matysiak, Jakub Nowociński, Przemysław Walczak
Technical Team: Marcin Kiersnowski, Łukasz Malinowski, Tomasz Rychter
Organiser: National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw
In Cooperation With: Zarząd Zieleni m.st. Warszawy and Dzielnica Wisła
The exhibition is co-financed by the Self-Government of the Mazowieckie Voivodeship, the governing body of the National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw.
