Aleksandra Czerniawska, Marianna Dębska, Barbara Gryka, Matylda Kozera, Piotr Marzec, Agnieszka Mastalerz, Anna Panek, Łukasz Radziszewski, Agata Rucińska, Katarzyna Ewa Sobczak, Michał Szaranowicz, Paweł Susid, Jan Wysocki

During our exhibition we present works from the Warsaw Academy of Arts students who went in 2015 for a summer artistic and exploratory journey to rural areas of podlaskie province, which was an initiative taken up by Paweł Susid’s Pracownia Przestrzeni Malarskiej. Young artists stayed in Białousy at Mr Jerzy Wilczewski’s farmstead which is a former PGR (State Agricultural Enterprise) transformed into the largest blueberry plantation in Poland and a deer farm.

This time, instead of taking part in a traditional plain-air workshop, students had an opportunity to confront themselves with the history of a place that has over the last decades been undergoing major social, economic and technological transformations. This inspiring stay bore fruit in the form of works prepared by means of various techniques, from painting and photography, to computer animations. The picture emerging from them is far from the idyllic portrait of Podlasie, but at the same time it is free of pitiful image of post-transformation poverty or worn-out folk clichés. It is filled with interesting stories about cosmic technologies used in contemporary agriculture, threads relating to ecology and unchangeably of forces of nature, and reflections on the labour division system, and ability to create human communities.