Almost Everything

Aneta Grzeszykowska creates photographs and videos that form the end result of performative actions she meticulously directs. This strategy brings to mind Roland Barthes’ contention that photography’s artistic lineage lies in theatre rather than painting. The French philosopher emphasised the medium’s relationship with the body, with the act of posing and with the identity of the person standing before the lens. Many of these threads can be traced in Grzeszykowska’s photographic practice.

Her works are made in series, which allows the author to revisit different aspects of the issues and phenomena she explores. She also makes sculptures — dolls she has been sewing since 2007, among them self-portraits and imagined likenesses of her daughter in the future.

Grzeszykowska’s primary artistic material is her own body, which serves as both subject and object of her creative process. Equally important are experiences and emotions drawn from her own life, which provide a key point of reference for her conceptual work. She realises her projects among those closest to her — people and other beings alike — and in relation to them.

Despite its modest size, the exhibition has a retrospective character: it presents photographs selected from twelve series created by the artist between 2006 and 2026, as well as the sculpture Franciszka 2025 from the CCA Collection. Grzeszykowska’s work has remained thematically coherent over these twenty years, so the works on display could be arranged without following chronological order. This approach highlights the central themes of the artist’s oeuvre, revealing its multifaceted character.

What emerges from the resulting palimpsest is a narrative about experiencing one’s own identity through the body, about mounting existential anxiety and inevitable transience — a gradual slide into nothingness. The artist treats her body as a transparent material that she subjects to continual deconstruction: she replicates it, erases it, disrupts its biological age and creates sculptural doubles. Corporeality is inextricably bound up with identity, which in Grzeszykowska’s works reveals its fluid, fragmentary nature and its resistance to definition.

In many projects, including Selfie (2014), Selfie with Dog (2023), Mother (2018) and Daughter (2025/2026), the artist asks whether it is possible to break free from cultural moulds and expectations. She examines the roles of woman, mother and artist, moving fluidly between them and blurring their boundaries. During a photo session with her daughter, husband and parents (Daughter), she wore a mask recreating her own face at the age of fourteen. These photographs juxtapose the past and the present, an ageing body and a young one, and the effect is unsettling: they undermine our perception of biological time and family relationships. In the Selfie series, Grzeszykowska replaced the human body with an animal one, and the living with the dead, making replicas of fragments of her own body out of pigskin. Creating a self-portrait from parts of a dead animal becomes a way of coming to terms with her own mortality. In Selfie with Dog, the human image becomes mere meat — food for a dog.

On many levels, the artist plays an ontological game with subjecthood, confronting viewers with the rift between presence and absence, between the ‘I’ and the realm of illusions and substitutes. For Grzeszykowska, art is a field of experimentation where she creates scenarios that are alternatives to reality while keeping them under her control.

In her characteristic way, she often counters the thematic gravity of her works with touches of humour, while also giving them an air of the uncanny.