:
>>Marta Niedbał. Zmysłowość i Rytuały
w rozmowie z Delfiną Jałowik ( in polish )
https://share.google/Q8tt3702sjKwUI7yE
>>Marta Niedbał. Zmysłowość i Rytuały
w rozmowie z Delfiną Jałowik ( in polish )
https://share.google/Q8tt3702sjKwUI7yE
selected curatorial texts and writtings:
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Gardenesque
solo exhibition text by Giulia Civardi
eastcontemporary, Milan, 2025
“A garden is a capsule, as well as a portal out of our time,” writes English author Olivia Laing. Whether a small piece of ground or an endless lawn dotted with flowers and ornamental species, a garden is never just a scene of soothing beauty. It is also a lens that refracts social, environmental, and political transformations. Gardens have long been a terrain of sovereignty and privilege—from the colonial-era trend of plant-hunting, whereby “exotic” species were systematically collected and imported from colonised regions to create picturesque European landscapes, to the role of slavery in shaping and maintaining these places of beauty. These events gave rise to the eighteenth-century English garden, the spread of new plant species, and a deeper understanding of their properties; however, they also led to the depletion of local ecosystems and the dispossession of land from local populations. Even today, the misdistribution of urban land, where the luxury of green space remains the preserve of a few, bears witness to this enduring inequity. And yet, if the garden is a stage upon which power reveals itself, it is also a ground of rebellion and shared dreams. With its generative force, the garden opens into various spaces: a place for reverie and repose, where time loosens its grip, and we are invited to surrender to the present, to sense the rhythm of other living beings.
If the garden is both a place of power and rêverie, artist Marta Niedbał embraces this duality. According to Niedbał, a cultivated landscape is not only a site of pleasure but also a terrain of rot and decay, conflict, and resistance. In her practice—which combines sculpture, drawing, tapestry, along with research in dance and the use of voice—she observes the life cycles of bodies and plants: their porous edges, the ways they interconnect, shift, and reemerge in unexpected forms.
Her tapestries, realised in Poland—where the artist is from and currently lives—contain abstract shapes that allude to flower bulbs, climbing plants, and large petals. Holes in the fabric interrupt the lines, offering a moment of pause—an interlude—while everything else is in motion. Other sculptures bear infinity signs, hinting at ways of perceiving time beyond linear measurement. Made of burned wood, these tablets reference alchemical practices of transforming matter through fire. A series of drawings realised using menstrual blood emphasise the cyclical nature of bodies and non-linear transformation. In Gardenesque, all the pieces are interconnected, cross-pollinating with one another. Figures and environments interweave, shapeshift, and transform, caught in a tension between fluidity and careful control.
In times of ongoing violence and instability, when people are reduced to a bare existence, alive but almost devoid of meaning, Marta Niedbał focuses on what is closest to her: the garden and its materials, but also the human body, something vulnerable yet a source of power and liberation. Her work invites us to reconnect with our desires and dreams, to notice the wild or tamed nature that keeps us alive. Using household fabrics, vivid and muted colours, porous surfaces, and abstract forms, her practice cultivates a sensual intelligence, an embodied understanding of materials. The work asks us not only to look at it, but to feel it with our entire body.
Like a vibrant garden where life and death continually intertwine, Niedbał's work reveals echoes of other worlds — if only we take the time to listen.
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The Temple of Tales
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Hold Me Closer
(...) At the heart of the exhibition are two fabrics created jointly by Niedbał and Olszczyński, which also blur the lines of individual authorship. Who made which part doesn’t matter. Polyphony is the basis of the works, and the dialogue resonates with concern for each other’s contribution. The aforementioned dissolution also means opening up to the surrounding reality and breaking through numbness and ostentation. The body is inscribed with histories that can be rewritten and redefined. Niedbał's activities return to the broadly understood aspect of healing, and in her latest works we recognize the motifs of digestion, mutations, but also massage devices. Her activities show a renewed interest in soft techniques of resistance. Processes that redefine the sense of attachment and enable connections with an unstable world, especially through tenderness and care. Her works show the cracks, leaks and unstable boundaries of bodies, engaging the viewer in the sensual sphere of being between ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet’, full of divergences and transformations. Her chosen medium allows her to work with a constant flow, a sensitive attention to what comes, what remains and what escapes in the creative process. (...)
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ING Polish Art Fundation main award text
Jury: Jana Baumann, Hanna Wróblewska, Kamila Bondar, Monika Brodka, Marcin Kryszeń.
https://ingart.pl/en during Warsaw Gallery week 2023
The cooperation of Marta Niedbał and Paweł Olszczyński is not limited to a joint presentation, but is primarily fulfilled in the co-created works. Rozpuszczanie/Dissolving – shows how by combining and interpenetrating the forms, techniques and motifs characteristic of each, a new quality is created, with which each of the artists but also each/each of us viewers – can identify. The fabric-assemblages, in which folklore inspirations appear, with all their haptics and sensuality, also point to the importance and essence of "craft" in the digital age, in which corporeality remains important although sometimes the body seems to be absent and gender boundaries blurred.
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Element I, curatorial description of the artwork in the context of Refugees Welcome exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw by Marta Lisok, 2023
The artist uses the porous medium of fabric, which allows her to build metaphors conveying the experience of fluidity. The abstract structures she creates evoke associations with the surface of a pond, densely covered with scum and weeds, pulsating with various life forms. Marta Niedbał’s meditations on water, with its soothing sounds of seepage and liquefaction, undermine stable categories for describing and defining reality. They highlight multi-species and non-hierarchical forms of connection, cooperation and communication, negating all boundaries and rigid divisions. They allow the artist to tell a story about the body visualized not as a compact form, but as a liquid substance that adapts to the surroundings, on which it wholly depends for its shape.
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From a fountain of wet dreams
by Marta Niedbał, 2023
for a Fluid Circulation project,
Cologne, 2022-23
Rubbing against the shore, emerged in the flood tide, thick, tart, brisk blood, full of plenty, full of heat.
Today it does not cool down, turns the waves into snakes. It creeps, hisses and loops.
(...)
Now I sense, it is a fountain that existed a long time before knives or flint. Born from a dark liquid moon, soaked in the fragrance of salty sea and iron rocks, it is my reminder to dance in the depths of cyclic flows. Not one thing or another. A bath full of hopes and despair.
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Material Fatigue. Text by Kuba Gawkowski for the national exhibition of polish tapestry at Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, Poland 2022
For Marta Niedbal, fabric is both a creative practice and a tool. Her commitment to manual labor and weaving, full of repetitive, ritualistic actions, allows her to explore the interstices between life and art. Her practice, based largely on an ethic of ecology and community, is a praise of the everyday, honesty and being together. The fabrics are also used by Niedbal to build interpersonal space and create performative “exercises.” (...) The collectively made video work Somnium Soft-Core is one form of activating Marta Niedbal's fabrics. In the hypnotic video, Niedbal's fabric appears as an important part of the 'natural' environment and interspecies community. It connects the human bodies of the performers and the landscape of the forest: the plants and insects that inhabit it. Images of nature and the peaceful coexistence of various creatures are complemented by recordings of performative actions and a textual narrative unfolding in the face of hypnotic music. “Being soft is a sign of strength” is heard in one of the scenes, which can be taken as an ethical-artistic motto for Niedbal's weaving practice.
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Some Holes in This House
Arkadiusz Półtorak in conversation with Marta Niedbał, 2022
(...)
Arkadiusz: What contexts should viewers of the exhibition at the Elementary know about?
Marta: The appearance of these works was determined by many factors, largely intimate – such as the aforementioned walks or meetings with loved ones. Or dreams… My works such as Tender Demonesses or Bestiala are like hybrid creatures “entangled” in feminine narrativity and complex, unstable relationships with the body and its sensual leaks. I would like the exhibition space to invite everyone to participate in an intimate relationship with a world that is full of stumbling blocks, holes and understatements. While working on the series shown at Elementarz, I was immersed in various readings, for example in the field of ecology. A term that caught my attention was “ecotone”, which means a transition zone between different ecosystems – such as an unploughed ridge. Ecotones are among the most mobile and changeable features of the landscape, and are often so fluid that grasping their essence becomes nearly impossible. They are places that occupy the zone between ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet’. The studio itself, where I work, seemed to be such a zone. As I’ve already mentioned, many of the activities I do there are not directly related to art- -making, but somehow influence it. Seemingly banal, sometimes routine – lurking forces of chaos.
Arkadiusz: I remember that when I visited you in your atelier for the first time, we talked about Jolanta Brach-Czaina and her philosophical praise of chores.
Marta: That’s it. Her Szczeliny istnienia (Cracks of Existence) – this great praise of everyday things and activities – is a very important book for me. By the way, it’s possible that if it weren’t for my daily chores, I wouldn’t have come up with the idea of taking up textile work seriously. Since the particular pieces we are showing at Elementarz have already left the studio, I am counting on others to spend the next few months loitering around them and putting them into new contexts. I invite the visitors into the space of the leaky “house” in transit, where everyone is free to become a resident – not just a spectator. Quietly whisper the demonesses that to inhabit the world – and not just to occupy it – is to live in an open, unsealed space. “He who is born must emerge or perish”. I am keen to strip at least some of the fabrics of their aura of individual, “sacred” works – so that visitors to the gallery can sit on them while talking to loved ones, listening to music or a lecture. I can only hope that the conversations around the works will be as affirmative as the circumstances surrounding the creation of some of this works.
Arkadiusz: So let’s count on a kairos!
ectract from an interview BLOK Magazine. Exhibition Some Holes in This House, Elementarz dla Mieszkańców Miast, 2022 Curated by Arkadiusz Półtorak, audio-performance Charlie Leona Jacewska
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Ode to disobidience
by Marta Niedbał
for a music performance by Charlie, Leona Jacewska,
as a part of exhbition Some Holes in this House.
I want to become in trouble. In love, in the polyphony of relations, in unknowns, learning crosswise, in a meal of uprooted flavours, in a house hosting a newcomer, in work, a place of tenderness. Fuck obedient competition! In a touch with wide ranges. I decide, what is anyway determined, I will not be longing for stability, but inhabit unstable bodies! Moving sands, uncertain grounds, fluid bodies, leaky creatures, transient houses, again and again.
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Sungazing
spell by Marta Niedbał, 2021
the epidermis will peel, but the color will soon even out Be a green lioness devouring the sun, a light-hungry heliophyte, photosynthesis increasing growth, liquid sulphate, a material cleansing vitirol. Feed and burn in this sun, and you will be born again.
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The Discomfort of Evening
from curatorial text by Magdalena Komornicka exhibition at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art
2022
(...)
Skeletons, zombies, centaurs, vampires, cute boys, women with agency, migrants, cyborgs – these are just some of the protagonists of the works on display. The broad array of artistic statements embraces intimate stories of depression, mental health, need for intimacy and love, loneliness, among other experiences. There is a fascination with old art and its iconography, mythologies, Slavdom, the ideas of history painting and Surrealism. Many pieces address the topic of violence – from self-inflicted to systemic, patriarchal and capitalist. Many feature irony and humour, pop-cultural fetishism, and draw inspiration from cyber futurism and posthumanism. Other important threads include death, mourning, nihilism and reflection on the body and sexuality. The show culminates with works that borrow from the poetics of disaster, devoted to the archaeology of the future, relation between humans and nature, magic, esotericism and a quest for spirituality (...)
Sabat
from curatorial text by Lidia Krawczyk, Magdalena Lazar exhibition at Galeria Podbrzezie, Kraków, 2021
(...)
A woman who creates, weaving the threads of her stories, is like a witch staring at a magic potion. These alchemical narratives in art are present in the works of artists invited to the SABAT exhibition, who not only rise above everyday rituals, but also are often not afraid to cast spells, wanting to pierce situations of apparent comfort with their voice. Echoes of magical and surreal stories float in the area of both metaphysical art and that which establishes relationships with pop culture. Although each of these spaces is governed by its own rules, both are united by the desire to reach the unspeakable, to work through horror using alchemy and the "romantic side of reality". Who is this figure of a witch, a hag for us and the artists we invited? Why do we need her right now? In contemporary customs, the witch is sometimes subjected to oppressive procedures, including exclusion and marginalization of her presence. The fact is that she is pejoratively associated with everything that is founded on the margins of taste and culture. She is identified with transgression on every level, physical, psychological, medical, political, religious, economic. She disrupts order, causes discomfort, demands change, criticizes systems of oppression. She is wisdom, but not the kind that can be associated with the rationality of old philosophers. Her knowledge has nothing to do with logic, including the capitalist order. (...)
Gardenesque
solo exhibition text by Giulia Civardi
eastcontemporary, Milan, 2025
“A garden is a capsule, as well as a portal out of our time,” writes English author Olivia Laing. Whether a small piece of ground or an endless lawn dotted with flowers and ornamental species, a garden is never just a scene of soothing beauty. It is also a lens that refracts social, environmental, and political transformations. Gardens have long been a terrain of sovereignty and privilege—from the colonial-era trend of plant-hunting, whereby “exotic” species were systematically collected and imported from colonised regions to create picturesque European landscapes, to the role of slavery in shaping and maintaining these places of beauty. These events gave rise to the eighteenth-century English garden, the spread of new plant species, and a deeper understanding of their properties; however, they also led to the depletion of local ecosystems and the dispossession of land from local populations. Even today, the misdistribution of urban land, where the luxury of green space remains the preserve of a few, bears witness to this enduring inequity. And yet, if the garden is a stage upon which power reveals itself, it is also a ground of rebellion and shared dreams. With its generative force, the garden opens into various spaces: a place for reverie and repose, where time loosens its grip, and we are invited to surrender to the present, to sense the rhythm of other living beings.
If the garden is both a place of power and rêverie, artist Marta Niedbał embraces this duality. According to Niedbał, a cultivated landscape is not only a site of pleasure but also a terrain of rot and decay, conflict, and resistance. In her practice—which combines sculpture, drawing, tapestry, along with research in dance and the use of voice—she observes the life cycles of bodies and plants: their porous edges, the ways they interconnect, shift, and reemerge in unexpected forms.
Her tapestries, realised in Poland—where the artist is from and currently lives—contain abstract shapes that allude to flower bulbs, climbing plants, and large petals. Holes in the fabric interrupt the lines, offering a moment of pause—an interlude—while everything else is in motion. Other sculptures bear infinity signs, hinting at ways of perceiving time beyond linear measurement. Made of burned wood, these tablets reference alchemical practices of transforming matter through fire. A series of drawings realised using menstrual blood emphasise the cyclical nature of bodies and non-linear transformation. In Gardenesque, all the pieces are interconnected, cross-pollinating with one another. Figures and environments interweave, shapeshift, and transform, caught in a tension between fluidity and careful control.
In times of ongoing violence and instability, when people are reduced to a bare existence, alive but almost devoid of meaning, Marta Niedbał focuses on what is closest to her: the garden and its materials, but also the human body, something vulnerable yet a source of power and liberation. Her work invites us to reconnect with our desires and dreams, to notice the wild or tamed nature that keeps us alive. Using household fabrics, vivid and muted colours, porous surfaces, and abstract forms, her practice cultivates a sensual intelligence, an embodied understanding of materials. The work asks us not only to look at it, but to feel it with our entire body.
Like a vibrant garden where life and death continually intertwine, Niedbał's work reveals echoes of other worlds — if only we take the time to listen.
The Temple of Tales
extract from the exhbition text by Joanna Kobyłt | BWA Wrocław, 2024
Marta Niedbal's work focuses on sensual corporeality and its
unstable boundaries. The artist does not divide the world into
external and internal. According to her, blurring the boundaries between one and the other leads to the erosion of the normative understanding of nature. - Release from its romantic,
untainted by human activity image).
(...)
At the bodily level, the solar plexus (plexus solaris), called the
“abdominal brain,” regulates breathing frequency. Because it
is closely connected to the nervous system, its pain can be the
result of fears - including those related to violating our physical boundaries. Bodies, however, are leaky, and in this leakiness they can catalyze change, contrary to the logic imposed
on them. Any symbiosis with the environment carries risks
and comes at a price: the alteration of a previously recognized
shape, of familiar boundaries of understanding.
Such a perspective is dedicated to the installation Portal,
which with its form resembles a leaky creature - a kind of passage through uncovered viscera.... The work, made from old
rocking chairs, resembles a figure whose beech-wood open
arms are bent as if they were elbows straightened. Its materiality hides history and stories spun on arched skids. Change is
the order of things.
(...)
Hold Me Closer
extract from the exhibition text by Katarzyna Piskorz | Hos Gallery, WGW, 2023
(...) At the heart of the exhibition are two fabrics created jointly by Niedbał and Olszczyński, which also blur the lines of individual authorship. Who made which part doesn’t matter. Polyphony is the basis of the works, and the dialogue resonates with concern for each other’s contribution. The aforementioned dissolution also means opening up to the surrounding reality and breaking through numbness and ostentation. The body is inscribed with histories that can be rewritten and redefined. Niedbał's activities return to the broadly understood aspect of healing, and in her latest works we recognize the motifs of digestion, mutations, but also massage devices. Her activities show a renewed interest in soft techniques of resistance. Processes that redefine the sense of attachment and enable connections with an unstable world, especially through tenderness and care. Her works show the cracks, leaks and unstable boundaries of bodies, engaging the viewer in the sensual sphere of being between ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet’, full of divergences and transformations. Her chosen medium allows her to work with a constant flow, a sensitive attention to what comes, what remains and what escapes in the creative process. (...)
ING Polish Art Fundation main award text
Jury: Jana Baumann, Hanna Wróblewska, Kamila Bondar, Monika Brodka, Marcin Kryszeń.
https://ingart.pl/en during Warsaw Gallery week 2023
The cooperation of Marta Niedbał and Paweł Olszczyński is not limited to a joint presentation, but is primarily fulfilled in the co-created works. Rozpuszczanie/Dissolving – shows how by combining and interpenetrating the forms, techniques and motifs characteristic of each, a new quality is created, with which each of the artists but also each/each of us viewers – can identify. The fabric-assemblages, in which folklore inspirations appear, with all their haptics and sensuality, also point to the importance and essence of "craft" in the digital age, in which corporeality remains important although sometimes the body seems to be absent and gender boundaries blurred.
Element I, curatorial description of the artwork in the context of Refugees Welcome exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw by Marta Lisok, 2023
The artist uses the porous medium of fabric, which allows her to build metaphors conveying the experience of fluidity. The abstract structures she creates evoke associations with the surface of a pond, densely covered with scum and weeds, pulsating with various life forms. Marta Niedbał’s meditations on water, with its soothing sounds of seepage and liquefaction, undermine stable categories for describing and defining reality. They highlight multi-species and non-hierarchical forms of connection, cooperation and communication, negating all boundaries and rigid divisions. They allow the artist to tell a story about the body visualized not as a compact form, but as a liquid substance that adapts to the surroundings, on which it wholly depends for its shape.
From a fountain of wet dreams
by Marta Niedbał, 2023
for a Fluid Circulation project,
Cologne, 2022-23
Rubbing against the shore, emerged in the flood tide, thick, tart, brisk blood, full of plenty, full of heat.
Today it does not cool down, turns the waves into snakes. It creeps, hisses and loops.
(...)
Now I sense, it is a fountain that existed a long time before knives or flint. Born from a dark liquid moon, soaked in the fragrance of salty sea and iron rocks, it is my reminder to dance in the depths of cyclic flows. Not one thing or another. A bath full of hopes and despair.
Material Fatigue. Text by Kuba Gawkowski for the national exhibition of polish tapestry at Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, Poland 2022
For Marta Niedbal, fabric is both a creative practice and a tool. Her commitment to manual labor and weaving, full of repetitive, ritualistic actions, allows her to explore the interstices between life and art. Her practice, based largely on an ethic of ecology and community, is a praise of the everyday, honesty and being together. The fabrics are also used by Niedbal to build interpersonal space and create performative “exercises.” (...) The collectively made video work Somnium Soft-Core is one form of activating Marta Niedbal's fabrics. In the hypnotic video, Niedbal's fabric appears as an important part of the 'natural' environment and interspecies community. It connects the human bodies of the performers and the landscape of the forest: the plants and insects that inhabit it. Images of nature and the peaceful coexistence of various creatures are complemented by recordings of performative actions and a textual narrative unfolding in the face of hypnotic music. “Being soft is a sign of strength” is heard in one of the scenes, which can be taken as an ethical-artistic motto for Niedbal's weaving practice.
Some Holes in This House
Arkadiusz Półtorak in conversation with Marta Niedbał, 2022
(...)
Arkadiusz: What contexts should viewers of the exhibition at the Elementary know about?
Marta: The appearance of these works was determined by many factors, largely intimate – such as the aforementioned walks or meetings with loved ones. Or dreams… My works such as Tender Demonesses or Bestiala are like hybrid creatures “entangled” in feminine narrativity and complex, unstable relationships with the body and its sensual leaks. I would like the exhibition space to invite everyone to participate in an intimate relationship with a world that is full of stumbling blocks, holes and understatements. While working on the series shown at Elementarz, I was immersed in various readings, for example in the field of ecology. A term that caught my attention was “ecotone”, which means a transition zone between different ecosystems – such as an unploughed ridge. Ecotones are among the most mobile and changeable features of the landscape, and are often so fluid that grasping their essence becomes nearly impossible. They are places that occupy the zone between ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet’. The studio itself, where I work, seemed to be such a zone. As I’ve already mentioned, many of the activities I do there are not directly related to art- -making, but somehow influence it. Seemingly banal, sometimes routine – lurking forces of chaos.
Arkadiusz: I remember that when I visited you in your atelier for the first time, we talked about Jolanta Brach-Czaina and her philosophical praise of chores.
Marta: That’s it. Her Szczeliny istnienia (Cracks of Existence) – this great praise of everyday things and activities – is a very important book for me. By the way, it’s possible that if it weren’t for my daily chores, I wouldn’t have come up with the idea of taking up textile work seriously. Since the particular pieces we are showing at Elementarz have already left the studio, I am counting on others to spend the next few months loitering around them and putting them into new contexts. I invite the visitors into the space of the leaky “house” in transit, where everyone is free to become a resident – not just a spectator. Quietly whisper the demonesses that to inhabit the world – and not just to occupy it – is to live in an open, unsealed space. “He who is born must emerge or perish”. I am keen to strip at least some of the fabrics of their aura of individual, “sacred” works – so that visitors to the gallery can sit on them while talking to loved ones, listening to music or a lecture. I can only hope that the conversations around the works will be as affirmative as the circumstances surrounding the creation of some of this works.
Arkadiusz: So let’s count on a kairos!
ectract from an interview BLOK Magazine. Exhibition Some Holes in This House, Elementarz dla Mieszkańców Miast, 2022 Curated by Arkadiusz Półtorak, audio-performance Charlie Leona Jacewska
Ode to disobidience
by Marta Niedbał
for a music performance by Charlie, Leona Jacewska,
as a part of exhbition Some Holes in this House.
I want to become in trouble. In love, in the polyphony of relations, in unknowns, learning crosswise, in a meal of uprooted flavours, in a house hosting a newcomer, in work, a place of tenderness. Fuck obedient competition! In a touch with wide ranges. I decide, what is anyway determined, I will not be longing for stability, but inhabit unstable bodies! Moving sands, uncertain grounds, fluid bodies, leaky creatures, transient houses, again and again.
Sungazing
spell by Marta Niedbał, 2021
the epidermis will peel, but the color will soon even out Be a green lioness devouring the sun, a light-hungry heliophyte, photosynthesis increasing growth, liquid sulphate, a material cleansing vitirol. Feed and burn in this sun, and you will be born again.
The Discomfort of Evening
from curatorial text by Magdalena Komornicka exhibition at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art
2022
(...)
Skeletons, zombies, centaurs, vampires, cute boys, women with agency, migrants, cyborgs – these are just some of the protagonists of the works on display. The broad array of artistic statements embraces intimate stories of depression, mental health, need for intimacy and love, loneliness, among other experiences. There is a fascination with old art and its iconography, mythologies, Slavdom, the ideas of history painting and Surrealism. Many pieces address the topic of violence – from self-inflicted to systemic, patriarchal and capitalist. Many feature irony and humour, pop-cultural fetishism, and draw inspiration from cyber futurism and posthumanism. Other important threads include death, mourning, nihilism and reflection on the body and sexuality. The show culminates with works that borrow from the poetics of disaster, devoted to the archaeology of the future, relation between humans and nature, magic, esotericism and a quest for spirituality (...)
Sabat
from curatorial text by Lidia Krawczyk, Magdalena Lazar exhibition at Galeria Podbrzezie, Kraków, 2021
(...)
A woman who creates, weaving the threads of her stories, is like a witch staring at a magic potion. These alchemical narratives in art are present in the works of artists invited to the SABAT exhibition, who not only rise above everyday rituals, but also are often not afraid to cast spells, wanting to pierce situations of apparent comfort with their voice. Echoes of magical and surreal stories float in the area of both metaphysical art and that which establishes relationships with pop culture. Although each of these spaces is governed by its own rules, both are united by the desire to reach the unspeakable, to work through horror using alchemy and the "romantic side of reality". Who is this figure of a witch, a hag for us and the artists we invited? Why do we need her right now? In contemporary customs, the witch is sometimes subjected to oppressive procedures, including exclusion and marginalization of her presence. The fact is that she is pejoratively associated with everything that is founded on the margins of taste and culture. She is identified with transgression on every level, physical, psychological, medical, political, religious, economic. She disrupts order, causes discomfort, demands change, criticizes systems of oppression. She is wisdom, but not the kind that can be associated with the rationality of old philosophers. Her knowledge has nothing to do with logic, including the capitalist order. (...)