Cockaigne
“Cockaigne” Exhibition
5 September – 9 November 2025
Arsenal Gallery power station, 13 Elektryczna Street (entrance from Świętojańska Street)
Artists: including Kateryna Aliinyk, Inside Job (Ula Lucińska and Michał Knychaus), Krzysztof Gil, Dana Kavelina, Dominika Olszowy, Karina Mendreczky and Katalin Kortmann Járay, Łukasz Radziszewski, Joanna Rajkowska, Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, Dominika Trapp
Curator: Katarzyna Różniak-Szabelska
Marshes have long served as places of refuge. People sought shelter there to escape state violence, serfdom, military conscription, and systemic exclusion. Michał Pospiszyl, who coined the term escape ecologies, writes that Eastern Europe, with its peat bogs, marshes, and swamps, offered an ideal sanctuary for fugitives and refugees, beyond the reach of the weak Polish nobility. Thanks to their inaccessible terrain and rich ecosystems, wetlands and dense forests enabled the formation of free, coexistence-based communities. A historian living in the Białowieża Forest argues that mud itself resisted modern imperial and nationalist efforts to impose order on the socio-natural landscape.
In a setting that evokes these places, we present the work of artists seeking spaces to confront and process trauma. The participating artists delve into the dark layers of the subconscious, dreams, and ancient beliefs, constructing their own mythologies. For them, mud becomes a metaphor for both the hardships they endure and the simmering, organic hope that persists. Their works reveal the potential of this kind of escapism as a way of engaging with intergenerational trauma, as well as with historical and contemporary experiences of war, patriarchy, and discrimination.
Today, as the last remaining marshes are colonised by technologies that monitor the flow of water and the passage of people, the exhibition becomes a symbolic attempt to reclaim a space of regeneration, care, and transformation.
The project is inspired by the work of historian Michał Pospiszyl, an assistant professor at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Pospiszyl has been a fellow of the National Science Centre, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University in Budapest, and a visiting scholar at New York University. He is currently working on a book about escape ecologies in Enlightenment-era Eastern Europe. He has already published on this topic in Environmental History (2023), with further articles forthcoming in the Journal of Modern History and Environmental Humanities.
Co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage from the Culture Promotion Fund – a state special purpose fund.
MEDIA PARTNERS
Arsenal Gallery is a municipal cultural institution financed from the budget of the City of Bialystok.
PLAN YOUR VISIT
Opening times:
Thuesday – Sunday
10:00-18:00
Last admission
to exhibition is at:
17.30