Jura Shust

Zachęta — National Gallery of Art

curator: Michalina Sablik

The vernissage and group performance Birds with Human Heads will take place on Thursday, July 16 at 7 p.m.

DJ set after the opening: Anton///Zenwerk (@zenwerk_)
20:30 — 22:30
alina.cafe.bar | free admission

Resin* Solar Weave is the first solo exhibition in Poland by Belarusian artist Jury Shusta.

It is a story about the relationship between human spirituality and technology. For the exhibition, the artist has prepared a new multi-channel installation consisting of films, sound, performative activities and objects made of organic and industrial materials, distributed in five Zachęta rooms. It introduces the viewer to a landscape stretching between a plantation of Christmas trees, a cemetery where trees grow from graves, and an ancient Eastern European forest. These are places where old ideas about the relationship between man and nature meet modern technologies — from industrial exploitation of the environment to artificial intelligence and digital communication networks.

In this landscape, spruce trees were once seen as links between the material and spiritual worlds, and the forest functioned as a sacred space. Today, these same areas are becoming an area of geopolitical tensions, surveillance infrastructure and intensive use of advanced technologies. The artist explores how these take on functions formerly attributed to rituals, mythologies and spiritual practices, and how they change our ways of communicating with our surroundings and understanding reality.

Jura Shust is a Belarusian artist (born 1983) living in Berlin who combines politically involved art with the creation of speculative visions of the future. He is interested in the relationship between spirituality, technology and biopolitics, as well as the possibilities of resistance to power systems. His work has been exhibited in numerous institutions around the world, including the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst GFZK in Leipzig, the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kiev, Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe and Management in New York. He participated in the 14th Baltic Triennale at the CAC in Vilnius, the 4th Art Encounters Biennale in Timișoara and the 15th Biennale in Gwangju. In Poland, the artist's work has so far been presented at a group exhibition at the Arsenał Gallery in Białystok, and his film Pine Cone Seeds (2022) was purchased in 2025 for the collection of the Museum of Art in Łódź. He runs the saliva.live portal focused on the study of the relationship between technology and nature.

Special thanks for the support of the exhibition to: Management, New York; Michael Reznik; Robert Triefus