Barbara Mydlak | When Day Became Night

Barbara Mydlak | When Day Became Night

Venue: Gallery Szewska 16
Opening: March 4, 2026, 5:00 PM
Exhibition dates: March 5-29, 2026

Curatorial Team:
Natalia Czarcińska
Jerzy Muszyński
Dorota Tarnowska-Urbanik

Curtains – objects that situate themselves in between. They are reactive membranes functioning at the intersection of light and darkness, and of the external and the intimate. They are liminal entities, dwelling neither here nor there, in a permanent state of suspension. Positioned in timelessness, on the threshold between before and after, they symbolically establish the boundary between the world of the living and the dead. They separate the stage from the audience, fiction from reality. They mark the beginning and the end of a performance. The lifting of a curtain turns us into observers or active participants in an event.

Introducing the reversal of day and night is, for me, a symbolic gesture and may function as a form of transition or passage into another world.
B.M.

Barbara Mydlak (born in 1987 in Biłgoraj) is an artist working between Poland and Belgium, currently based in Ghent. She creates organic objects, among others from cellulose obtained from “rejected” plants, whose origin and use, as well as pigments, scents, medicinal properties, and defense mechanisms determine the form and meaning of her installations. These are often expanded with film, photography, documentation of process and research, sound, or interactive elements.

Her artistic practice unfolds in long-term cycles and is strongly connected to nature and the regional traditions of southeastern Poland, where she grew up. Drawing from autobiographical experience, her works explore themes of forgetting and the modification of memory, as well as rituals related to illness, healing, death, growth, and processes of decay.

She studied archaeology at the University of Warsaw and graduated from the Faculty of Visual Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź. In 2024, she received her PhD from the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of the Arts Poznań. Her projects have recently been presented, among others, at the Venice Production Bridge during the Venice Biennale and at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Beijing. She was a finalist of the COAL Prize 2023 in Paris and a recipient of grants including the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC) in France (2025) and the Arts Decree (Kunstendecreet) in Flanders (2024).

www.barbaramydlak.com