One constant is giving the audience as much space as possible. I like to think of my work as a kind of “negative” presence - it doesn’t affirm or proclaim itself, yet it remains irreducibly there. There is a way of looking at my works as inwardly directed objects, allowing the viewer to engage with them on their own terms.

Throughout my practice, I’ve approached this inwardness in different ways, from objects that seem to form a protective layer around something, caring only for what they enclose, to environments that question the viewer’s place and presence.

The frailty of time and memory has always been central to my practice. From there, it naturally extends into forms of absence and in-between states - doubles, copies. These motifs feel biographical not because I am that way, but because experiences and beings of this nature are, for me, both deeply precious and capable of fueling nightmares.

I’m also drawn to questions of labor, though that interest developed more gradually. It’s something I approach carefully, often staying close to its surface. Labor occupies a paradoxical position - it is both the closest and most essential condition for everyone within the current economic system, and at the same time a subject shaped by contemporary theory that can produce a kind of intellectual alienation.

I think that feeling comes from that irreducible state of simply being - something not oriented toward a specific function or message. When objects turn inward, you’re confronted with being in the presence of something, without trying to decipher a single, clear communication.

I also think it’s underappreciated how much our relations have been reduced to transactions. In general discourse, art is often framed as a one-sided transfer of knowledge or feeling to the viewer. The non-transactional elements are disappearing one by one. Even new social connections are often perceived in terms of their potential future value. I like to compare the uneasiness some works produce to the awkwardness of sitting in a waiting room with others, catching each other’s eyes from time to time.

I’ve been developing the idea of a “personal archive” - an amalgam of fact and fiction that constructs our identities. What it holds exceeds the categories of true or false; it includes lies, fabrications, and misremembered events. A copy is interesting to me because it’s almost non-existent, more like a mental shorthand.

It is meant to function as something else - the original - but ideally it isn’t ontologically lacking in comparison to that initial form. At the same time, exact reproduction is impossible; there are always slight inadequacies. I see this as a similar rupture in our model of the world as in those slightly wrong objects: when a copy is made, a kind of crease begins to shimmer.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly, but the second presidency of Donald Trump confronted me quite directly with the nature of the commodity. I had been using aluminum a lot, but around 2024 it became expensive very quickly. The social contract embedded in the material started to overtake its physical presence, and it suddenly felt like a social material rather than a construction tool. I felt as if I wasn’t working with a metal alloy, but with nationalistic tendencies, military applications, and a kind of clownish egoism.

That banal realization led me to think of my works as a kind of codification of the social contracts I exist within. I began to notice more clearly what is being bought and sold at the same time. To emphasize this, I started introducing small, almost humorous accents - like the gloves I used while working, or my protective suit sealed in a vacuum bag.

We tend to think of time as linear, always moving forward, but in experience everything that has happened is felt at once, like the Benjaminian angel of history. At the same time, the culture we produce and consume strongly emphasizes a linear sequence - things begin and things end.

Returning to the idea of a “personal archive,” I don’t think it’s true that things simply start or end, and they don’t even need to have happened in order to have an impact. My sculptures, like all objects, reflect this by making that accumulation visible and palpable.

I see this in relation to the politics of standardization that I’ve been addressing in my recent work. Standardization can be a beautiful, universal language - something we can use when necessary, a kind of Enlightenment project that allows for shorthand and a basic shared understanding of reality. At the same time, rational thought is a very lossy mode of thinking, and it inevitably erases small creases and nuances.

This becomes most visible when an emotion completely overwhelms your present existence and someone tries to rationalize it. In that moment, the limits of factual description become clear. It feels especially relevant now, as the growing extraction of surplus value depends on treating the world as if it conforms exactly to the standard being taught to machines.

In my video Blow out the candles one more time, a montage of hundreds of hours of archival recordings from 2000 to 2005, I use family memory as a conceptual counterweight to the intimate materials I’ve been working with, like wood and cloth. A symbolic presence of my grandfather becomes the starting point for an experiment in constructing a “personal archive.” He owned a prewar workshop in Warsaw and made hand-painted wallpapers for wealthy clients.

Even though no physical remnants of his work remain, and the story survives only in fragments I’ve overheard, the mere idea of producing luxury goods became so seductive within my family that it transcended fact and fiction, becoming inseparable from our shared history.

For me, this shows the power of the commodity as a reification of social relations within an object. It connects both to artistic production and to my idea of the “personal archive.” Commodities are conceptual before they are material - fact, fiction, memory, and fabrication merge within them to produce what they are.

Small disturbances are where the standardized model begins to break, where its limits become visible. Over time, our model of reality, especially at a social level, tends to become more simplified, allowing safeguards to be dismantled, education to be weakened, and the workforce to be diminished.

Dramatic ruptures, on the other hand, are often vulnerable to reactionary forces. They produce a general deterritorialization of reality - nothing feels familiar, everything becomes alienating, and there is a demand for a strong new narrative to emerge quickly. Small disturbances are always present before such ruptures. They can be used to build an understanding of what is happening without that extreme alienation; they soften the shock.