Here, where the land ends and the sea begins | Gosia Kępa

Here, where the land ends and the sea begins | Gosia Kępa
Gallery Design, 9 Wolnica Str.
Opening: 6.03.2025, 19:00
Duration of exhibition: 6.03.2025 – 6.04.2025
Open: Monday – Sunday, 10:00 – 18:00
Curator: Zosia Sałasińska

When you look at water, you see what you think is your reflection. But it’s not yours. You are a reflection of water.

from Roni Horn’s monologue Saying Water

We are looking at ourselves in the mirror of the great water. Listen, see, and touch. Taste. The water beneath us is a trans-species source of knowledge – an extension of earthly existence. Where the land ends and the sea begins, new cognitive horizons emerge, challenging the established order. The coastline is constantly changing, not allowing the eye to become accustomed. A landscape once captured will never be the same again. And yet, the earth seems to endure – it is rough, leaving marks. One would like to possess it, tame it, hold onto it. As long as we don’t lose the ground beneath our feet.

The project was created during an academic exchange at the Universidade de Lisboa, carried out within the Erasmus+ program. The starting point for Gosia Kępa’s creative explorations was a fascination with the ocean, and its result became a multi-dimensional artistic work that touches on both intimate themes and global issues of migration, as well as natural resources viewed as capital, subject to systemic patterns of domination.

What else will we feel if we sharpen our senses? Is there a chance that in deep listening we might hear ourselves?

Gosia Kępa (1997)

She comes from Świdnica. Photographer, visual artist, graduate of Social Psychology at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, as well as Photography at the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of the Arts Poznan.

She works in the field of various media – including: photography, object, drawing or performance. She is interested in broadly understood relationality. Deals with issues related to identity and coexistence. She is moved by nature and has a weakness for finding delights in organic forms. For her, photography is primarily a tool for meeting other people.

The author is good at organizing meetings around art. She conducted workshops on analog photography techniques (such as cyanotype or antotype), an open photography workshop, and a meeting around soil. In 2022, she participated in an artistic residency in Vistula with the Flow collective, and since then she has been passionately exploring aquatic themes. She spent the winter semester of 2023 on exchange in Portugal, at the University of Lisbon, where she researched the topic of land and ocean. As part of her diploma project, she analyzed different types of duration in cooperation with three rivers. In the fall of 2024, she participated in an artist residency at the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, where she looked at the earth and examined the pigment potential of soil materials.