HEM — Anna Baumgart Opening — 23/10/2026, 19:00

The HEM exhibition combines the works of Anna Baumgart from different moments of her work — from early video productions and sculptures to the latest installations prepared for CSW Ujazdowski Castle. The combined works from different stages of the artist's activity form into a story in which recurring themes, images and tensions resonate in completely new contexts.

The central motif of the exhibition is the woman's body — which has been present in Anna Baumgart's work for years as a kind of space for writing: identity, memory and resistance. For the artist, however, it is never exclusively private, but remains entangled in social, political and environmental relations. The individual is constantly intertwined with the collective.

The eponymous heme - the component of hemoglobin responsible for the binding of oxygen and the red color of blood - becomes for Baumgart a figure of flow, a continuous cycle of life. On the one hand, it testifies to the body as a space of constant exchange, on the other, it indicates what connects us with other organisms, history and environment. From this perspective, Baumgart's works on motherhood, sexuality and the right to self-determination fit into the framework of contemporary debates about human rights and non-human beings. However, the uniqueness of these works is primarily due to the artistic consistency and originality, thanks to which the questions posed years ago still remain open and meaningful.

The exhibition refers to the thoughts of Luce Irigaray, as well as to Astrida Neimanis, describing organisms as open systems of interdependence. Along with the blood circulate affections and memory — they reveal experience as a relational phenomenon that transcends the boundaries of a single body and creates a network of material and emotional connections.