Do What You Wish
Kasia Banasiak / Aleksandra Błach / Aida Małgorzata Duda / Angelika Stefaniak
Summary Exhibition of the OP_YOUNG Program
Curator: Paulina Brelińska-Garsztka
Exhibition opening: April 10, 2025, 7:00 PM
Exhibition duration: April 10 – June 29, 2025
Curator-led tours: bit.ly/43ZFYNK
„Where else, if not from our imagination, should we draw the strength
for the long-awaited renewal of our external world?”(1)
Michael Ende
They say: Be careful what you wish for, it might just come true. In art, wishes take shape in forms and images that can serve as both a refuge and a revelation or confrontation. This exhibition begins with precisely such a confrontation – with the mirror image. A pane of glass, positioned directly opposite the entrance, marks the boundary between reality and imagination. At the same time, the imperative that lends the exhibition its title – Do What You Wish – invites self-reflection on imaginary worlds and their role in shaping reality.
The title of the exhibition refers to the inscription on the Auryn medallion from Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story. While the phrase Tu was du willst might suggest unrestricted freedom, its meaning runs deeper – it urges us to consciously shape reality in accordance with our own values and vision. For Ende, imagination was a driving force that has enabled us to create mythologies, art, and science while also offering the resilience to face the challenges of the external world. The exhibition resonates with this idea, positioning the surrealist writer as a secondary narrator and presenting art as both a space of freedom and a refuge. Art is not simply a reflection of imagined worlds; it embodies inner metamorphosis and engages critically with reality – its luminosities and shadows, crises and complexities.
In the context of this exhibition, the participating artists reflect on the arduous path of their profession, drawing upon a distinctive visual language infused with elements of magic, fairy tales, and dreams. Their approach, however, stands in contrast to Ende’s belief that true narrative value only emerges when stories are stripped of personal and biographical elements. According to him, only then do they attain the status of universal symbols. Yet, can art ever truly detach itself from lived experience?
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Cross Sections of the Self is a story about the fragility of the human psyche, about isolation, and the emotional tension woven into everyday life. Two motionless figures face each other within the gallery space, evoking a frame from The Neverending Story. In the film, two sphinxes stand as sentinels, guarding the passage to the next stage of the journey. Here, they are reimagined as dolls with spherical joints and faceless mirrors. Aleksandra Błach constructs an illusion, drawing upon the motif of mirror multiplication (Spiegel im Spiegel), a theme extensively explored by Michael Ende. In her installation, both sculptures and viewers find themselves doubled – their silhouettes endlessly multiplied and altered by movement. The static tableau demands that the audience walk through its carefully composed symmetry. One can also peer into the mirrored tunnel within the figures’ transparent heads. In the context of the exhibition, Błach’s work resonates with the contemporary concept of the mirror world – a vision in which the digital realm replicates reality on a one-to-one scale, shifting every aspect of life into the virtual sphere: work, relationships, even emotions. Her installation not only confronts viewers with this scenario but places them at its very center.
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Aida Małgorzata Duda, on the other hand, transports us into a world of organic forms – structures that seem to pulsate, grow, and exist with a life of their own. Her garden consists of oversized, deformed animals and plants, evoking the artist’s memories related to the loss of a loved one. These organic monsters serve as an allegory of time’s passage and the fragility of memory, while simultaneously manifesting an underlying anxiety about technological progress and humanity’s growing detachment from nature. Duda’s work draws upon the imagery of her grandmother’s garden – a place where she first learned to be attuned to the world around her. In this installation, she constructs an alternate universe where sculptural material becomes a vessel for memory. Here, nature is no longer a refuge but a transformed, almost hallucinatory presence, existing on the other side of the mirror. The artist’s narrative continues in the last room of the gallery, where it takes on its most unconventional and unsettling form.
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The display in the chapel is preceded by the motif of The Fairy by Kasia Banasiak. Much like Remedios Varo decades ago, Banasiak crafts hybrid figures, intertwining animal, human, and botanical elements. A mirror subtly emerges within these forms. The silvery door of the Dressing Table evokes the grandeur of altar triptychs and the meticulous detail of medieval genre scenes. The bittersweet atmosphere of the room is shaped by striking contrasts: feathers and shells, intimacy and theatricality, fairy tale and nightmare, mysterious substances and precious materials. Banasiak continues the artistic tradition of transforming everyday objects into sculptures, while her paintings and drawings capture quotidian reflections with a deliberately ironic and sweet touch, as she herself explains. Upon closer inspection, traces of stains and intricate details suggestive of the human body emerge within the works. This is a world both crafted and continually redrawn – an almost folkloric universe, where the central figure is none other than Banasiak’s own double.
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Angelika Stefaniak, in turn, draws on childlike perception, weaving animistic and artificialistic references into her works. Her series comprises five ceramic forms, each symbolizing a value system – an internal core that shapes individual identity. These sculptures refer to the concept of pink-collar workers – professions traditionally assigned to women, often undervalued and marginalized. Stefaniak includes her own artistic practice within this category. As she notes: Creative passion often brutally confronts me with reality. This tension leads the artist back to her childhood – a time imbued with both magic and the early lessons of rivalry and social hierarchy. The scenography of the gallery room reinforces this theme, incorporating drawings inspired by the chalk lines of backyard playing fields. Within this setting, the ceramic figures are arranged like players, poised for a game whose rules remain ambiguous and whose outcome is unknowable.
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The exhibition Do What You Wish resonates with the spirit of surrealism – a movement born in a different era yet one that continues to inspire new generations of artists in their search for personal modes of expression. Following in the footsteps of Erna Rosenstein or the aforementioned Remedios Varo, contemporary artists embrace traditional media – sculpture, drawing, and painting – to carry avant-garde ideas forward, transforming them into narratives that endure as long as they are told.
Paulina Brelińska-Garsztka, marzec 2025 r.
Bibliografia:
1.M. Ende, Der Spiegel im Spiegel Ein Labirynth, 1990.
2.C. Fuchs, Die mise en abyme im Werke von Michael Ende, 2011.
3.Hatalska, N. (2025). Pakiet 4 raportów: Świat Lustrzany. InFuture Institute (https://infuture.institute/produkt/pakiet-raportow-swiat-lustrzany/)
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Artists:
▪ Kasia Banasiak
▪ Aleksandra Błach
▪ Aida Małgorzata Duda
▪ Angelika Stefaniak
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Team
Curator: Paulina Brelińska-Garsztka
Production: Paweł Zaręba
Promotion / PR: Maria Majchrowska
Coordination: Viktoriia Tofan
Visual Identity: Jurek Mossakowski
Implementation: Michał Michałczak
Translation: Karol Waniek, Volkmar Umlauft
Collaboration: Karolina Jara, Weronika Kałuża, Iga Mikuśkiewicz, Walentyna Schaiko, Ivan Shpak, Viktoriia Tofan, Agnieszka Wróblewska
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▪ Organizer: OP ENHEIM
▪ Co-organizer: VOP
▪ Honorary Patron: WOMAK
▪ Co-financed by: Lower Silesian Voivodeship Government (www.dolnyslask.pl)
▪ Patron: GENTZ
▪ Partners: Kauposil, KEIM, OPEN Reklama Oksana Solnik-Krzyżanowska
▪ Media Patrons: Charaktery, Contemporary LYNX, SZUM, Radio LUZ, Pismo Artystyczne Format, Notes Na 6 Tygodni
This project was co-financed from the budget of the Lower Silesian Voivodeship Government.
