Zuzanna Kozłowska • Café Manekin
The exhibition is part of the Inicjatywa Entry Award

Curator: Weronika Wojda

April 5 – May 31, 2025
exhibition opening: April 5 (Saturday), 5 p.m.
Galeria Promocyjna, Staromiejski Dom Kultury

Café Manekin, formerly known as Café Largactil, was located in the basement of the Bornbach tenement house in Warsaw, at 2 Old Town Square. Three floors above, a gallery presenting contemporary art has been operating continuously and under various names. The institution’s archive spans almost 70 years. It is located next door, in a former jeweller’s shop. An untold part of this history rests in boxes and, in the form of paper scraps, haunts the archivist of the Staromiejski Dom Kultury (Old Town Cultural Centre). The Café Manekin exhibition is a space between a paper folder and a heavy wardrobe, a conversation with the ghost of the art gallery rather than a reckoning with the past.

Zuzanna Kozłowska, winner of the Entry 2024 Initiative Award, has created oak veneer-covered cabinets, boxes and site-specific cardboard installations. In contrast to exhibitions where works are brought into a clean, white gallery and then carried out, the artist wanted to create something that relates to the history and space of the Galeria Promocyjna. The works linger, clinging to the archival interior, both as preciosities and junk.

The artist’s intention is not to create a historicising exhibition (such an exhibition already took place in 2021 under the title ‘Krzywe Koło’, curated by Ewa Tatar), but to convey the experience of interacting with the archive and the ongoing history of a place that survived the times of communism and the transition to a free market economy, remaining a centre of cultural development to this day. The boundlessness of the work, the struggle with matter that requires specific storage, the choices of what to keep and what to throw away — these are the problems that Kozłowska confronts in this exhibition and in her artistic practice. If art galleries are haunted, then ghosts return from archives. We have returned from Café Manekin.

coordination: Zuzanna Andruszko, Kinga Cieplińska

organisers: Galeria Promocyjna, Staromiejski Dom Kultury

partners: Inicjatywa Entry, Fine Arts Academy in Warsaw

translations: Tomasz Zając

graphics: Punkt Widzenia

media matronage: NN6T