Abandoned Constructions: Architectures of Formation and Phantasms of Emancipation
Site-specific exhibition within the framework of the Construction Festival, Dnipro, August 2025
curator: Maciej Zdanowicz
Site-specific exhibition within the framework of the Construction Festival, Dnipro, August 2025
curator: Maciej Zdanowicz
The exhibition Abandoned Constructions: Architectures of Formation and Phantasms of Emancipation is conceived as a space for artistic and theoretical dialogue on the ruins and afterlives of modernism. It takes place in the Dnipro Art College, within its staircases, corridors, and classrooms left empty for the summer, spaces that carry both the promise of formation and the signs of abandonment. These interiors, neither ruins nor fully functioning institutions, reflect a suspended condition: they hold traces of the avant-garde belief in art education as a path toward emancipation and social renewal, while also bearing witness to systemic underfunding, infrastructural decay, and the uncertainty of a city at war.
Dnipro itself forms an essential part of this narrative. Once a closed Soviet city, home to rocket and space industry, it embodied the utopia of modernity and the belief that technological progress could secure a better future. It was a laboratory of modernist planning, industrial growth, and cultural institutions. Today, however, it is also a frontline city, marked by displacement, fear, and resilience. The exhibition reflects this duality: between the modernist dream of cosmic horizons and the present reality of precarious survival, between the architectures of order and their partial collapse into ruins.
The project draws upon critical readings of modernism offered by Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and Byung-Chul Han. Foucault’s understanding of institutions as spaces of discipline and heterotopias allows us to read schools and cultural centers as mechanisms of control and formation, shaping both behavior and identity. Baudrillard highlights how modernism has often functioned as a simulacrum—producing images of rationality and order detached from lived realities. Han reminds us of that modernization today operates from within: individuals internalize the pressures of efficiency, productivity, and self-optimization, and even art schools can become sites of exhaustion and self-imposed constraint.
Through these perspectives, the exhibition questions the unfinished architectures of modernity: both literal and metaphorical constructions, once imagined as foundations of emancipation, now appear as fragile and contested. The works presented here engage with legacies of totalitarian pasts, soviet inheritances, and unhealed wounds of the world wars, which resurface in the context of the ongoing russian aggression. They delve into local histories and herstories, excavating forgotten fragments, exposing suppressed narratives, and asking about the politics of truth and lies in relation to collective memory. At the same time, they reflect on migration, minorities, and individual memory, confronting us with the challenges of humanism and the question of art’s role in times of crisis.
Abandoned Constructions gathers artists from Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Latvia, and Germany, who together create a dynamic constellation of works in video, sound, photography, conceptual graphics, performance-for-camera, and symbolic site-specific interventions. The participants are: Resl Ay (TR), Katarina Balunova (SK), Maciej Bohdanowicz (PL), Wojciech Domagalski (PL), Elżbieta Jabłońska (PL), Maria Kiesner (PL), Daria Koltsova (UA), Michał Krawiec (PL), Michalina Kulpa-Piekarczyk (PL), Anka Leśniak (PL), Magdalena Leśniak (PL), Inga Levi (UA), Joanna Małecka & Maciej Staniecki (PL), Jakub Matys (PL), Maksym Mazur (UA), Denitsa Milusheva (BG), Aleksandra Pałgan (PL), Marta Romankiv (UA), Mikołaj Sęczawa (PL), Justyna Sokołowska (PL), Wacław Szpakowski (PL), Rafał Urbański (PL), Maciej Zdanowicz (PL), Katarzyna Ziołowicz (PL).
Created under wartime conditions, this exhibition is not only a curatorial project but also a gesture of artistic solidarity. It transforms abandoned educational spaces into temporary laboratories of thought, resilience, and fragile hope. By revisiting the architectures of modernity and confronting their phantasms, the participating artists open a space for reflection on what it means to practice art and culture in times of uncertainty and destruction, and on how education and creativity might continue to serve as fragile tools of resistance and reimagination.