WŚCIEKŁE STWORZE / ENRAGED CREATURES

Link to the event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/ipLKK36pm3A?si=_BrhUiFuRTWCCr2p

Among popular New Year and Carnival traditions were those characteristic of the winter solstice period, connected with magic and divination. WŚCIEKŁE STWORZE / ENRAGED CREATURES is the first outdoor presentation in the career of the artist from Podlasie, featuring sculptures placed in the forest next to the independent Solniki 44 Cultural Centre run by the Coincidentia Group.

Drawing on the Carnival tradition of winter balls, masquerades, and processions, the artist stages a procession in the forest composed of sculptures dedicated to demonic figures found in traditional folk rituals. Using her characteristic creative method, Tarasewicz places on trees what she herself calls “enraged sculptures” —abstract interpretations of forest demons as folk talismans meant to ward off evil.

“Reacting to the disintegration of the world, my mind automatically begins to think about how unstable the sense of security is and how there is no longer any truly peaceful enclave. For some time now, visions of enraged sculptures have been haunting me. They appear in the gaps between day and night as rather blurred, organic forms. They look like demonic gargoyles that repel evil from buildings, except that now I see them on trees in the forest next to my home, as if humanity’s last resort were to beseech demons and trees for grace and prosperity.”

Carnival becomes a time of role reversal, provocation, and masquerade, and the devil—a figure combining evil with freedom and liberation from social norms.

The audience will have the opportunity to walk through the forest together with the artist, the Coincidentia Group, and Joanna Łępicka, a poet working at the intersection of different arts.

The poems read during the event come from the volume Olbrzym (The Giant), whose thematic scope may be described as “that which overwhelms” the author. Drawing on folk notions of justice, the texts remix perspectives on the moral order of the world, governed by supernatural forces and nature, where good deeds are rewarded and evil ones inevitably punished. In the dualistic world of reality and spirituality, moral principles and respect for tradition are as important as statutory law and equally stifle the possibility of expressing what is, as it is. Łępicka’s texts and Tarasewicz’s sculptures form a duet of what is emotionally and symbolically repressed and hidden. The central motif in the presented cycles of works by both artists is the devil.

Bio

Iza Tarasewicz (born 1981 in Białystok) graduated from the Faculty of Sculpture and Spatial Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań in 2008. She lives and works in Kolonia Koplany, a small village near Białystok where she grew up. Working with sculpture, installation, drawing, and performance, her works have gained recognition both in Poland and internationally. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide.

She is a recipient of the Bavarian Art Promotion Award (Bayerischen Kunstförderpreise) in the field of fine arts (2019) and the Deutsche Bank Foundation Award Views in 2015—the most important award for young art in Poland, co-organized with the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. In 2016 she took part in the 32nd São Paulo Biennial, the 5th International Biennial for Young Art in Moscow, and the 11th Gwangju Biennale; in 2018 she represented Poland at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale in collaboration with Centrala. She recently participated in the 40th EVA International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Limerick. In 2013 she was nominated for the Polityka Passport Award in the visual arts category. In December 2026, as the first Polish artist, she will present a solo project—a large-scale installation—at the prestigious Secession institution in Vienna, and in 2027 she will create a sculpture in public space as part of the Skulptur Projekte Münster festival, held once every decade.

Joanna Łępicka (born 1995 in Dąbrowa Białostocka) is a Polish poet, literary critic, and editor. She is the author of the poetry book Zeszyt ćwiczeń (Exercise Book, Biuro Literackie, 2023), for which she received a nomination for the 2024 Gdynia Literary Prize in the poetry category, the 2024 Wiesław Kazanecki Literary Prize of the Mayor of Białystok for debut, and third prize in the 20th National Artur Fryz Literary Competition for the best poetry book debut of 2023. For the project of her second poetry book Olbrzym (The Giant), she received the Gliwice Literary Prize in 2025 in the post-debut poetry category. In 2025 she was awarded a Creative Scholarship from the City of Kraków in the literature category.

In the photo: Iza Tarasewicz, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, photo by HaWa.