Transit

Exhibition title: Transit
Venue: Pop Culture Gallery, Stary Browar, 42 Półwiejska Str., Poznan
Duration of exhibition: 10.04.2025-04.05.2025
Curator: Agnieszka C. Maćkowiak
Participating artists: Gabriela Bałdyga, Oksana Fedchyshyn, Aleksandra Gigiel, Olga Ilicheva, Aleksandra Kaim, Anastazja Kramer, Gabriela Palicka, Borys Szadkowski, Martyna Wojciechowska

Modernity is an era of movement. People, ideas and values ​​on the move are redefining the relationships between places, cultures and individuals. Mobility, both physical and symbolic, is not just a neutral process, but a dynamic network of interdependencies, where exchanges often take an asymmetric form. Transit is not just a passage from one point to another, it is a process in which meanings are negotiated and belongings are redefined.

Never before has mobility been so intense and ubiquitous. Flows of capital, ideas and people shape new hierarchies and divisions – not everyone can move freely, not every movement means an equivalent exchange. Within the global economy and cultural policy, there are dominant and subordinate directions. What is translocated and what is excluded from circulation? What values ​​are adapted and which are deformed in the exchange process?

Exchange is not a neutral process, it is a mechanism in which culture is subject to selection and reinterpretation. Contemporary centers absorb peripheral elements, but give them new meanings, adapting them to the logic of the global market. “Locality” often becomes a commodity, something that can be sold, reproduced, commercialized. Tradition is stylized as “authenticity,” and regional aesthetics undergo a process of gentrification. At the same time, the peripheries gradually assimilate dominant patterns, adapting global narratives to their own contexts and social conditions. Models of life organization, aesthetics, and cultural practices introduced by the centers become points of reference, redefining local structures and forms of expression. Is transit, then, a real exchange or rather an asymmetric appropriation?

Identity in the era of mobility is no longer simply rooted in a place, but is linked to the experience of movement and constant negotiation. It becomes a hybrid – the result of the interpenetration, adaptation and reinterpretation of what is inherited and what is assimilated through migration and cultural flow. Does mobility enable dialogue or does it become a tool of domination?

The exhibition “Transit” explores these mechanisms as a process of cultural and symbolic exchange. The participating artists analyze movement as a form of dialogue, tension and transformation, between stability and fluidity, between local and global, between past and present. In a world where flows are inevitable, where does exchange end and asymmetry begins?