From 17 December 2025 to 14 March 2026, the Dnipro-based Artsvit Gallery hosts a solo exhibition by the Polish artist and curator Waldemar Tatarczuk, When I Am in Ukraine, Everyone Asks Me about Poland; When I Am in Poland, Everyone Asks Me about Ukraine. The exhibition project unfolds in two parts. The first brings together works created in collaboration with Ukrainian artists—long-term friends and colleagues who accepted Tatarczuk’s invitation to engage in a shared artistic dialogue. The second part turns inward, presenting the artist’s individual works and documentation of performances. This more intimate and reflective space reveals a personal dimension that has long remained in the background of his collective practice. Specially for Artslooker, the exhibition’s co-curator Stach Szabłowski has written a text that further explores the context of the project and Waldemar Tatarczuk’s artistic practice.
Waldemar Tatarczuk’s exhibition is an unusual solo presentation by an artist in an unusual situation. Tatarczuk is an artist. This fact bears emphasis, as for many years his artistic identity remained overshadowed by the role he performed as director of Galeria Labirynt in Lublin. Is this exhibition, then, a return of an art official to an authorial artistic practice? Yes—and no. For even when Tatarczuk served as director, he did not so much hold that role as perform it, in a manner characteristic of an artist.
When I Am in Ukraine, They Ask Me about Poland; When I Am in Poland, They Ask Me about Ukraine is an atypical project also because this solo exhibition is simultaneously—indeed, primarily—a group exhibition. Alongside Tatarczuk, ten artists living and working in Ukraine take part in the show.
It is difficult to imagine Tatarczuk alone—even, or perhaps especially, at his own solo exhibition. Relationships with others constitute the foundation of his creative stance. They also form a bridge between Tatarczuk’s practice as a curator and as an artist.
The exhibition thus becomes a space of encounters between Tatarczuk and Ukrainian artists—those who accepted his invitation to work together. The outcome of these meetings is ten creative dialogues, materialized in the form of artistic works.
The backdrop of the project When I Am in Ukraine, They Ask Me about Poland; When I Am in Poland, They Ask Me about Ukraine is the program developed by Tatarczuk, as well as the specific operational model of Galeria Labirynt, which in recent years has occupied a distinctive position within the Polish artistic landscape. By expanding curatorial tools with instruments drawn from the repertoire of the performer and the artist, Tatarczuk was able to create an experimental institution marked by an anti-institutional character. This model proved not only highly effective but also resilient in the face of the political and social crises of recent years. Guided more by artistic than bureaucratic logic, Labirynt was able to respond to these crises, remaining operative precisely at moments when classical institutional strategies failed.
One of the most important features of Labirynt’s program—alongside its clear stance in support of civil liberties and minority rights—was the development of a Polish-Ukrainian dialogue conducted through the language of art. The presence of works by Ukrainian artists became particularly intensive after 2014.
The encounters and creative collaborations whose outcomes are presented in the exhibition are rooted both in events that took place at Labirynt over the past dozen or so years and in the personal relationships and friendships forged by the artist in Ukraine.
After 1989, art in Poland was oriented primarily toward the effort to enter the international art circuit; these aspirations were part of a broader project of the westernization of Polish society. As in the political sphere, this relationship was based less on dialogue than on adapting both institutional culture and artistic discourses to Western models. Labirynt’s program line devoted to Ukrainian art was founded on an alternative concept. Its aim was to create a platform through which Polish audiences could become acquainted with the artistic scene of their neighbors, but also to propose a reversal of vectors of interest: learning from Ukraine, and studying the analogies and differences in the ways the condition of culture is narrated in societies undergoing transformation, burdened with the legacy of totalitarianism, and posing questions about their national, civic, and political subjectivity in a globalizing post–Cold War world.
The artistic collaborations presented in the exhibition are likewise the outcome of a learning process—shifted, however, from the level of intercultural dialogue to a personal and artistic dimension. Tatarczuk engages here in a risky game: is a return to the position of a creative subject still possible for someone who for many years occupied an institutional role? The artist responds to this challenge by adopting the position of a learner—someone who begins anew. He invites to collaborate artists whom he respects and admires. In these artistic dialogues, he follows their practices, often reaching for techniques in which he had never previously worked. Each of these encounters therefore unfolds according to a different scenario.
In his collaboration with Zhanna Kadyrova, Tatarczuk learns to work with stone, creating a sculpture modeled on her works from the Palianytsia project. In his meeting with Pavlo Kovach, he assumes the role of executor of a painterly scenario and concept developed by the Ukrainian artist. With Vasyl Tkachenko, he agrees to create two paintings based on the same photograph—a double (auto)portrait of both artists. To Kateryna Aliinyk, he hands over two of his own paintings, which the artist uses as supports for the creation of image-palimpsests. In ceramics, he produces sculptural interpretations of motifs drawn from the drawings of Stanislav Turina. He becomes the performer of performative instructions whispered into his ear by Yaroslav Futymskyi. With Vlodko Kaufman and Nikita Kadan, he meets on the ground of a shared fascination—common to all three artists—with the figure and symbolism of the flag. With Denys Pankratov, he creates a joint installation in which photographic images and objects coalesce into a kind of shared floral landscape, stretched between Donbas and Lublin. Anton Saenko incorporates Tatarczuk’s likeness into the landscapes depicted in his dark photographs. In response to Saenko’s painterly landscape, Tatarczuk, in turn, adds a sound layer—a song in which, among other things, the exhibition’s titular phrase resonates: “When I am in Ukraine, they ask me about Poland; when I am in Poland, they ask me about Ukraine.”
Last but not least, the exhibition presents a selection from Tatarczuk’s artistic oeuvre—from his earliest appearances at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s onward. In his case, performance was not merely a practiced discipline, but also—perhaps above all—a philosophy of being in art and in society. In his most recent works, particularly those created through dialogue with Ukrainian friends, he moves beyond performativity and beyond his own artistic idiom, experimenting with practices and languages of expression that are new to him, inspired by the art of those he esteems and respects. And although many of the works address public issues, some of them take the form of personal, even intimate gestures. Together, they complete a multidimensional image of Tatarczuk: the artist-curator who creates spaces of expression for others; the artist-citizen responding to political reality; a creator with a queer sensitivity, for whom art is a realm of desire; and a trickster whose stance questions both the mechanisms of political oppression and the artistic-institutional structures that limit freedom of creative expression and individual liberty—both within art and beyond it.