Śreżoga

Exhibition by The Uncanny Valley, an interfaculty research group at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, supervised by Dr. Aleksandra Liput.

Artists: Antoni Przewodowski, Cyprian Szablak, Ewa Nowik, Zuzanna Mazurek, Karol Kowalczyk

Curator: Iza Roko

/

It's scorching hot. All around you stand repetitive concrete apartment blocks, enclosed by angular hedges dulled grey with dust. The entrance doors and windows are thrown wide open, sheer curtains gently billowing in the heavy breeze. From behind them come the muffled sounds of TV game shows and commercials, accompanied by the constant hum of electric fans.

You walk through the middle of the housing estate, passing a cast-iron playground painted in dark green oil paint. There are sandboxes too, surrounded by simple wooden benches. Hardly anyone is here—other children's parents have told them to stay inside, away from the sun. Although it has already begun to sink lower in the sky, the sunlight still slips over the roofs of the low-rise apartment buildings, burning any exposed skin and illuminating colourful toy catalogues displayed behind the window of the closed kiosk.The neighbourhood convenience store, however, is still open. Its windows, cluttered with faded cardboard ice cream menus, catch and reflect the sunlight in bright flashes. You buy a sweet drink and head back to your grandmother's apartment building.Inside, the stairwell walls are painted cream on the upper half and a thick, greasy orange below. Over-dried ferns lounge in plastic planters on the windowsill. The window has been left slightly ajar to hide the evidence that someone has been smoking. Yet the smell and traces of cigarette smoke still linger in the motionless air.You step into the apartment. As you slip off your sandals, you lean against the wood panelling lining the walls. You walk into the living room, where your grandmother is watching her favourite TV series on a flat-screen television wedged into a plywood wall unit. You lie down beside her on the sofa bed. The air is hot and stifling. Your eyelids grow heavier and heavier, and before you even realise it, you fall asleep. You dream in vivid, suffocating nightmares.

Śreżoga is the shimmering distortion of hot air rising from the ground. We most often associate it with the distant, wavering surface of asphalt on a scorching summer day. Memories shimmer on the horizon of our minds in much the same way, and it is the echoes of childhood that remain with us most vividly. This exhibition explores precisely that: the universality of certain memories of growing up, and the ways in which our mental images of places, objects, and events can prove to be unexpectedly shared.