Joy, Garbage, Resurrection

Polana Institute is organizing a solo exhibition by Ukrainian artist Jan Bačynsky. The exhibition presents a series of textile-based works created between 2022 and 2025 in response to the forced displacement of the artist following the onset of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. These pieces emerged under conditions of nomadic, provisional existence – formed in the liminal space of prolonged suspension, uncertainty, and chronic crisis – stretching across countries and contexts. Working with fragments of personal clothing and found remnants of everyday life, the artist treats these materials as vessels of memory, identity, and connection to a lost home.

Jan Bačyński’s practice revolves around themes of belonging, loss, the body, and memory. Through the mediums of textile, material objects, text, and video, he explores how individual experience can be transformed into collective structure. Processes of collecting, sorting, layering, and stitching become both formal and symbolic strategies in his work, rooted in tactile slowness and material presence – a counterpoint to the instantaneity of the digital image.

The pieces on view hover between sculpture, relic, and personal journal. Many bear visible traces of previous use, textual interventions, or small embedded objects – material testaments to memory. Their forms emerge from a logic of disintegration and reconfiguration, following the drift of entropy rather than resisting it.

Unlike fact-based accounts of war, Bačyński’s works do not document events, but instead give form to the emotional substance of lived experience. Within this intimate space, there is also joy, and gratitude – for continuity, for the fragments that remain, for the story that still exists, even in material form. In a world where many have been stripped of that story, the act of holding onto it becomes both a privilege and a quiet act of resist