WellBEINGS

Can art help us get through a crisis? Can the creative process become a form of dialogue with our own emotions? A way to regain balance, and an attempt to find meaning in experiences we cannot always name? What exactly is the well-being in the title: a state that can be achieved, or a constant effort to come to terms with the surrounding reality?

The exhibition Dobrostany is an attempt to answer these and many other questions we ask ourselves about the mental condition of contemporary people. It tells a story about their inner world, about a psyche that constantly reacts to life experiences, trying to integrate and understand them. It is a story about states we know very well, though we cannot always name them.

The exhibition title, deliberately ambiguous, is a play on words that links the concept of “well-being”, associated with balance, safety, or a good mood, with the multitude of other states a person may find themselves in. The plural form itself challenges the belief that well-being is one clearly defined and attainable state. Can one be in well-being while feeling sadness? Does a crisis always mean its absence? Can loneliness be both a source of suffering and a space we need for ourselves? Are tension or the urge to escape the opposite of well-being, or might they be part of the path to recognizing it? The title invites us to pause and reflect, and to look at mental condition not as a simple division into “good” and “bad”, but as an ever-changing landscape of experience.

The exhibition presents various perspectives and modes of narration. Alongside works by artists who draw on their own experiences, we will also see works by creators-observers who comment on the state of contemporary society. The show includes diverse media, from painting, drawing, and printmaking to collage, installations, and works using text. The variety of languages of expression corresponds to the variety of human experience: from what can be told, painted, and seen, to what remains unspoken and unnamed.

Dobrostany become a pretext for a conversation about the human psyche, free of prejudice and oversimplification. They prompt reflection on what happens within a person in moments of crisis, and on how varied the paths to regaining balance can be. It is a meditation on subjectivity and its inner dynamics, on a mental world that remains in constant motion, subject to tensions, fractures, and processes of transformation.