The Mystery Is Looking. Alicja Żebrowska’s Art and Poland’s Political Transition

The text was written in response to Alicja Żebrowska’s exhibition The Mystery Is Looking: Works from the Transition Period (Tajemnica patrzy. Prace z czasu transformacji) curated by Jakub Banasiak at the Gdansk City Gallery in 2024. The artist’s early works were presented as ‘the art of the new spirituality’. Her classic works belonging to the canon of feminist and critical art have been almost completely omitted. Thus, the experience of systemic transformation recorded in Żebrowska’s art was presented as a mystical mystery. By recalling interpretations of the artist’s works from the 1990s and 2000s, tracing how the feminist discourse was constituted in Polish art after 1989, as well as the changing views of the artist herself, the author tries to see what the mystery understood in this way actually hides. With the help of the non-representational theory, she proposes a reading of Żebrowska’s art that opens up the possibility of grasping transformation as an experience, and not only as images and meanings superimposed on it one by one.