Alicja Pakosz. The Birds Speak Polish

Alicja Pakosz
The Birds Speak Polish
26.09 – 11.01.2026

Curator: Katarzyna Różniak-Szabelska
Production: Ewa Chacianowska

Giewont stirs from its slumber, the birds speak Polish, and the willows scream in terror. Alicja Pakosz reinterprets motifs drawn from Polish legends, 19th-century painting, and popular culture. Her work explores banal nationalism as the unnoticed, normalized national symbols embedded in everyday life. In her exhibition at the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, she traces these symbols in culturally ingrained ways of depicting the landscape. Her new paintings and a large-scale diorama, in her signature style, combine absurd humour with an unsettling sense of tension. Through these works, the Silesian-born painter examines her own relationship with Polish identity, set against the backdrop of an ongoing war in a neighbouring country and the rise of nationalist narratives.

Alicja Pakosz (b. 1996, Tychy) is a Kraków-based artist working in painting and its spatial extensions through installations and dioramas. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, she is currently pursuing a doctorate at the Doctoral School of the Commission of National Education University in Kraków. Her works have been shown at venues including Gdańsk City Gallery, Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, CSW Kronika in Bytom, ADA in Rome, Raster in Warsaw, and Office Baroque in Antwerp. She has also participated in group exhibitions at Podium in Hong Kong, Her Clique in Lisbon, BWA in Katowice, and Galeria Piana in Kraków. In April 2025, she took part in an artist residency at the Polish Sculpture Center in Orońsko.