UTRACONE / LOOTED

multi-channel Video INSTALLATION

Utracone (Looted) transforms painting into an act of deliberate unmaking. This durational video installation, presented across the walls of Galeria Podbrzeże, confronts the ongoing afterlife of artworks looted from Poland during the Second World War. In dozens of looped recordings, a hand repaints these missing pieces—each brushstroke rendered with care, only to be wiped away. The process is repeated again and again.

Projected in a quiet, immersive grid, the videos cycle out of sync, producing a rhythm both relentless and tender. Viewers navigate a space where nothing settles into permanence—where painting becomes both a remembrance and a refusal.

Rather than attempting restitution or repair, Looted rehearses return. It lingers with loss without trying to resolve it. The archive it draws from—a national register of looted Polish art—remains incomplete, shaped as much by erasure as by politics. Among its entries is Raphael’s long-lost Portrait of a Young Man, a symbol not only of cultural theft but of how memory is maintained through absence. Looted invites the viewer not to interpret, but to witness—each gesture echoing those of lost hands, each erasure an offering without claim.

This work was created in painting collaboration with three international artists: Jessica Houston (Canada), Macia Teusink (UK), and Tracy Grubbs (USA).