Inheritance

Inheritance is an exhibition for those who like to play with intertextuality. An ironic game toying with audience habits and the conventions of bourgeois art. An exhibition created out of rags, broken furniture, coupon leaflets mashed to a grayish pulp, and scrap metal that even the junkman passed up.

I Am a Victim of My Own Success

“Je suis victime de mon succès,” Roland Topor, the French writer, artist, and masterful black humorist, would say of himself. The same could be said of painting as a whole. Contemporary art functions as an investment, arm in arm with class privilege. At the Studio gallery, we present images and objects doubling as acts of resistance, forming a rebellion against capitalism even as that selfsame system ingests, warps, and markets them. Inheritance, on view from October 2025 to January 2026, brings together works by Andreea Anghel, Przemek Branas, Rafał Bujnowski, Paweł Marcinek, Aleksandra Nenko, Dominika Olszowy, and Mikołaj Sobotka. All were created from scraps. These works embrace the aesthetics of trash, reference Kantor’s reality of the lowest rank, evoke scenographic battlefield sets, shed light on neo-tribalist drawings ranging back into prehistory, and summon sci-fi visions of apocalypse. Inheritance is a fable built from and upon ruins, tackling issues of ceaseless overproduction, the accumulation of capital, chronic precariousness, and social inequality. It is a return to the past, reconjuring futuristic visions of apocalyptic cinema, delving into wildness—a state that may now exist solely in the realm of fantasy.

It Fell, Shattering to Pieces 

The title of the exhibition alludes to the assets of a legal estate being passed on to a deceased’s heirs. The estate is generally divided and, in the process, fragmented, bringing to mind an object that has been dropped, splintering into shards. Here, inheritance has less to do with “heritage”—with a thing revered, passed down through the generations from one privileged heir to the next—than with remnants: decay, loss, ruin. 

Curator Ania Batko, inspired by the anthropology of waste, an archaeology of modernity, and the work of Roland Topor, proposed Inheritance as an exhibition, in 2024, in response to BWA Wrocław’s ongoing open call. Inheritance will be especially compelling to viewers drawn to intertextual play and literature of the grotesque and avant-garde, and to those interested in an anthropology of the everyday, an archaeology of the present era, and histories and critiques of capitalism.