HAEM

The exhibition brings together works by Anna Baumgart from different moments in her practice – from early videos and sculptures to the newest installations commissioned by the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Set alongside one another, works from different stages of the artist’s career form a narrative in which recurring themes, images and tensions resonate in entirely new contexts.

The central motif of the exhibition is the female body – ever present in Anna Baumgart’s work as a space where identity, memory and resistance leave their record. In her hands, however, the female body is never purely private; it remains entangled in social, political and environmental relations. Within it, the individual is continually interwoven with the collective.

The haem in the title – the component of haemoglobin responsible for binding oxygen and for the red colour of blood – becomes in Baumgart’s work a figure of flow, of the ceaseless circulation of life. On the one hand, it speaks of the body as a space of constant exchange; on the other, it points to what connects us with other organisms, with history and with the environment. Seen from this perspective, Baumgart’s works on motherhood, sexuality and the right to self-agency sit within contemporary debates on the rights of humans and more-than-human beings. Their exceptional quality, however, stems above all from an artistic consistency and originality thanks to which questions posed in the past remain open and meaningful today.

The exhibition draws on the thought of Luce Irigaray and of Astrida Neimanis, who describe organisms as open systems of interdependence. Affects and memory circulate along with the blood – revealing experience as a relational phenomenon that crosses the boundaries of the single body and forms a network of material and emotional connections.