UTRACONE
exhibition, Galeria Podbrzezie, Kraków, 2023
Installed within the revitalized halls of the former Jewish School of Crafts in Kraków’s Kazimierz district, Utracone (Looted) engages directly with questions of cultural loss, memory, and erasure. The site—now home to Galeria Podbrzeże—anchors the work in a layered context shaped by displacement, survival, and institutional transformation.
In dozens of looped videos projected across the gallery’s walls, a hand repaints artworks looted from Poland during the Second World War—only to wipe each one away. The process repeats indefinitely. Each gesture is temporary, each image undone. Together, the loops form an uneven, recursive rhythm that resists closure.
Rather than pursuing restitution, Utracone rehearses return. It draws from Poland’s national register of looted art—a partial archive shaped by war, bureaucracy, and political omission. Among its entries is Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, a work long presumed destroyed by many.
The installation treats painting not as a tool of recovery, but as a medium of refusal—refusal to forget, to settle, or to resolve absence into narrative. In the setting of Podbrzeże, the work becomes a quiet counter-monument: immersive, repetitive, unresolved.
This work was created in painting collaboration with three international artists: Jessica Houston (Canada), Macia Teusink (UK), and Tracy Grubbs (USA).
The Australian Embassy in Poland was the Honorary Patron of the exhibition.
