WAW

Every second person living in Warsaw is a woman—or identifies as one—yet this reality is barely reflected in urban planning or street naming. How many streets are named after women? Every day, we pass, pronounce, and type in street names, often without knowing what they mean or who the notable people behind them were. There are 5,800 streets and squares in Warsaw, and about twenty percent of them commemorate specific individuals. Nearly 1,300 are named after men, while only around 150 honor women—and those are often dead-end streets or back alley.

Maryna Tomaszewska’s exhibition “WAW” invites viewers into such a back alley. Set in the context of the House of Meetings with History (DSH), the installation subverts the invisibility of women on city plaques by presenting feminist statistics, gender-based textile maps, and detailed biographies of invisible street matrons—most of whom can be found in districts like Białołęka or Targówek. The exhibition highlights the deep asymmetry in the historical and cultural narrative of gender representation in public space but also carries a sense of hope. An alley is both an end and a beginning, a point of no further passage, but also an opening to reflection on what a feminized public space might look like. What could women—their perspectives, ways of thinking, and lived experiences—bring to urban planning?

This so-called “data gap” is described by Caroline Criado Perez in her book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. The author observes that such narrative constructions have a fundamental impact on how we perceive and structure social and cultural mechanisms in which we operate daily—in Warsaw, Hamburg, or Kyiv. Both the book and the exhibition pose the same question: how can we rethink and design cities so they work for everyone?

A 2009 resolution by the Warsaw City Council provides street naming guidelines, which should: “use names derived from proper names, common nouns, or commemorative terms, while maintaining a necessary balance between them and avoiding, where possible, the dominance of commemorative names.” This exhibition and the accompanying publication aim to demystify and counteract the marginalization of women in public space.

Curated by Joanna Warsza