A House on Roots

01.08 – 11.10.2026 A House on Roots

Zachęta Project Room

curator: Magda Kardasz coordination: Pola Gadowska

Ana grew up in Pavilnys, a district of Vilnius, studied in Warsaw, and now divides her time between the two cities. Łukasz divides his time between his home village in in the Podlasie region of eastern Poland and Warsaw, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. ‘Their places’ on the map lie close together. I, too, was intrigued by certain affinities between Ana’s painting and Łukasz’s conceptual work — the inspiration drawn from the local, the probing of the sense of identity, the close relationship with nature — and so it occurred to me to invite them to create an exhibition in dialogue for the Zachęta Project Room. This is how A House on Roots came about.

For both artists, the title speaks of their strong bond with the places they come from. For Ana, it is primarily a story about the complex origins of identity and the connection between humans and nature. Łukasz reflects on the future of his own village and family, building wider social bonds around domestic rituals.

Ana Vostruchovaitė is exhibiting paintings, objects, and textiles that were specially woven for the occasion. Titles such as Sisterhood, Study of a Cat, View from My Window, Forest Spirit, Black Bread, Digging Season, Do You Still See Me at Dusk, Łuczynki (pine-splinter lights), Flower in a Pot and Root System nicely capture their intimate mood and almost archetypal subject matter. Her paintings on canvas keep to a refined, pastel palette — as do the colourful plaster reliefs and jacquard textiles, for the artist likes to experiment with drawing her images out of the frame. Her home and the old, lushly green district of Vilnius, where she grew up and now maintains a second studio alongside the one in Warsaw, are a constant source of inspiration. Regarding the exhibition’s title, the artist writes: ‘In my work, roots symbolise a sense of attachment and belonging, though not necessarily to anything fixed. They spread widely and their structure is not strictly defined. This is why my definition of home is based on something constantly changing: it shapes my origins and my way of life. This is not just about changing place, although it is partly that too. Above all, I use the metaphor of winding roots to express the freedom with which we build our own identities. I am part of the Vilnius national minority in Lithuania.’

The exhibition also includes more abstract works by Vostruchovaitė, which are most often built around organic shapes. In other compositions she examines the human body from a posthumanist perspective, as an integral part of nature. A good example is a new painting in which human figures hide their heads beneath bird mask, as if crossing the species barrier. As the artist puts it:‘My working material is the nature that is close to me, and multiculturalism. The typical landscape of the eastern regions, the local vocabulary and customs. The posthuman figure depicted on my canvases and in my sculptures no longer plays a dominant role in the world. Its identity is fluid, touched by digitisation and seemingly able to ‘spill over’ into plants and back again. When exploring my family’s home region, I closely examine the details of life that bring our everyday existence closer and sometimes tell specific stories. Through my work, I ask myself what identity actually is. Perhaps it is our own creation.’

Łukasz Radziszewski has shifted focus from making artefacts to customs and traditions, as it is with these that his sense of at-homeness is bound up. Since 2016, he has run Zakwas, an ongoing project in which he gives sourdough starters more than a hundred years old to people who attend his meetings and workshops, and teaches them to bake bread. He builds a community around an everyday domestic ritual. At the Zchęta Project Room exhibition, he is staging a new, similarly unifying event: he is teaching invited guests the disappearing skill of whittling small boats from bark. In his home region — and no doubt in other places too — this custom was passed from father to son, or from parent to child. The boat would then usually be set adrift on the water. For Radziszewski, this gesture also serves as a lesson in distance and a means of coming to terms with loss. Bark is an extraordinarily beautiful and malleable material. At the Zachęta Project Room, the artist will present a composition of boats that were made during workshops in his home village of Karczmisko, as well as at a village fair in Gródek in the Podlasie region. Hanging in rows on the wall in various shades of brown, the boats resemble lines of primeval cuneiform script or runes. The installation will be accompanied by a film documenting the boat whittling and the sense of community that emerged during these gatherings. An integral part of Radziszewski’s presentation is a programme of boat-whittling workshops, led by the artist himself and his artist friends from various disciplines, running throughout the exhibition.

Metaphorically representing the Warsaw side of Łukasz Radziszewski’s identity are spatial collages made from public transport tickets that he and his friends compulsively collect. The artist has used the silver holographic strips printed with the word ‘Warszawa’ to create objects in the shape of branches and plants. He calls these objects ‘emblems of a sensibility shaped in Warsaw’. The presentation concludes with a collage assembled from the same strips. The attentive viewer will notice that they spell out the name ‘Marinetti’. In doing so, Radziszewski ironically invokes the name of the Italian Futurist Tommaso Marinetti — a man fascinated by fascism — whom he calls ‘an enemy of local identities’.

A House on Roots brings together two artists who use radically different means of expression to create works that ultimately convey a similar message. Their works demonstrate that local identity can serve as an anchor and a means of navigating today’s unsettled times.

Magda Kardasz