Anything to do with astral bodies / Bożena Grzyb Jarodzka, Ewa Ciepielewska, Konstanty Laszczka, Olga Mokrzycka, Małgorzata Mycek, Agnieszka Brzeżańska, Karol Radziszewski

Contemporary life is a life of wakefulness. It is illuminated by the light of reason, guided by transparent procedures and the capacity for rational planning. Wakefulness is made up of medical diagnoses, legal regulations, forms, statistics, and crossing the street only when the light turns green. Everything has its cause; nothing happens by chance. And yet we are haunted by a longing—a longing for dreams. And by the fear that something may be slipping away.

We check the results of laboratory tests, then knock on wood. We plan our careers according to rational procedures, yet before making important decisions we trust our intuition, lay out tarot cards, or consult a horoscope. We fear ghosts in the basement. We use satellite technology to calculate the positions of the planets at the moment of our birth. And at night… at night we lay our bodies down in bed only to enter a wondrously irrational reality, where the voice of a deceased grandmother offers warnings, impossible animals give chase, and our hands refuse to tighten around the hilt of a sword.

Perhaps we were never made solely for wakefulness. Perhaps we need the black cat. Perhaps we feel safer knowing there is a ghost wandering through the attic. Perhaps two plus two does not always have to equal the same thing. Perhaps we understand the world more fully when our waking vision is overlaid with the afterimage of a dream. Could meaning itself reside in this very transposition?

Until relatively recently, magic, religious belief, and fantastic imagination formed a coherent model of the world, offering answers to questions that everyday experience could not resolve. Images, legends, and superstitions were not merely decorative additions to reality; they gave meaning to daily life, which without them might have appeared as nothing more than an endless exercise in rationality. What we now call "irrationality" was never irrational in its own time. It has only recently come to be regarded as such.

,,Anything to do with astral bodies” suggests that rationality has never occupied the entirety of human experience. Beneath its surface persist older cosmologies: healing practices, relationships with ancestors, astrological maps, and hybrid figures that blur the boundaries between humans and animals.

The exhibition at BWA Warszawa does not advocate a return to a pre-scientific worldview, nor does it seek simply to rehabilitate superstition. Instead, it asks what disappears from our lives when rationality is accepted as the only legitimate mode of existence. Magic, astrology, and dreams need not be understood as competing theories of the physical world. They may instead offer ways of experiencing uncertainty, grief, embodiment, and our relationships with animals, plants, and the dead. They may also reveal needs for which the institutional language of modernity has no place.

Wakefulness and dreaming do not constitute two hermetically separate realms. Dreams leave their residue upon waking life, while rational order continually generates fantasies of its own. Fear inhabits procedures; myths shape political calculation; medicine retains traces of incantation; technology carries utopian dreams within it.

,,Anything to do with astral bodies” explores this zone of overlap: that fleeting moment when our eyes are open, yet what we see still belongs to the world of dreams.