Three solo exhibitions will be presented in the North Gallery of Sapieha Palace in 2025.
On 7 February, we invite visitors to the installation Interviews with the Monster by Czech artist Eva Koťátkova (b. 1982). The artist’s works, which often resemble monumental stage sets, examine forms of institutional control, manipulation, and discrimination. Koťátkova’s practice also explores the formation of binary structures of thought, stereotypes, and prejudices, and seeks new forms of communication and coexistence based on the principles of freedom, equality, and empathy.
On 13 June, a solo exhibition by Estonian artist Edith Karlson (b. 1983), curated by Maria Arusoo, will open to the public. Her typically large-scale, immersive sculptural installations feature animals, people and creatures that escape clear definitions. The artist’s works speak of the states that plague contemporary humans, the absurdity of a world that has lost its mystery, and the innermost impulses of the senses and imagination.
The North Gallery’s 2025 season will conclude with an exhibition by German-Iraqi artist Lin May Saeed (1973–2023), opening on 3 October. Her work, which often features Styrofoam sculptures and wall-based reliefs, as well as steel gates, silhouettes and drawings, addresses the human-animal relationship. Through her distinctive imagery, which weaves together recognisable motifs from Eastern and Western cultures, Saeed explores narratives of animal subjugation and autonomy.
4 April will mark the beginning of the opening weekend for the group exhibition Breaking the Joints and a screening programme curated by Post Brothers and Edgaras Gerasimovičius. The exhibition considers the status of the body within the history of animation, elaborating on essential concepts from cartoons while also examining what this mode of world-building can tell us about our world today. With a nod to Sapieha Palace’s former use as a military hospital and an ophthalmology clinic, the exhibition explores the fusion of optical technologies and corporeality in animation, reflecting on the practices of body manipulation and discipline, the dominant forms of non-normative body representation, and ways to resist them.
25 January marks the launch of the moving image programme at Sapieha Palace. The inaugural season will focus on films by artists who actively question how we perceive and experience the world. These works encourage us to have a critical relationship with contemporaneity, question systems of knowledge and forms of representation, and focus on archives, memory, language, and feminist worldmaking. The screenings will be accompanied by meetings and conversations with the programme’s participants.
On 8 March, we invite you to the inaugural Sapieha Palace Symposium. Art historians, conservators, and sociologists will come together for a day of intensive exchange, focusing on the theme of ageing, its representation in art, and the epistemological and practical challenges stemming from the temporal impermanence of materials.