The Lifery exhibition-situation: Summer Season / Solar Negotiations 

Solar Negotiations is the summer edition of The Lifery exhibition-situation, curated this season by Bogna Świątkowska. The exhibition’s point of departure is the time it takes for the Sun’s light to reach the Earth: 499 seconds. This delay is enough to unsettle our most fundamental understanding of the present. Throughout this summer at Świdnicka 2-4, visitors will engage with works by thirteen artists negotiating with the Sun across a range of mediums.

The Lifery, as an exhibition-situation, resembles a living organism, subject to internal rhythms of dissolution and renewal, and to the cycles of nature. Since its inauguration in January 2026, The Lifery has been developed with the participation of artists invited to collaborate by Katarzyna Roj, the creator of the concept behind the space. Some works—installations, objects, projects, photographs, and essays—have remained, permanently incorporated into the space, gradually revealing their potential across seasons. Others establish symbolic portals, enabling journeys of the imagination to various landscapes and places, including the spa palaces of an earlier era. Inspiration drawn from the idea of the sanatorium has been present in the gallery since 2019, even before its reconstruction, with The Lifery functioning as a chamber in which visitors may embrace rest and participate in intimate events and artistic interventions.

Sculptural objects, video works, textiles, installations, pyrography, heliography, art glass, drawings, and masks from the earlier spring edition of The Lifery. All of these feature in this summer’s Solar Negotiations. Here, the Sun is not merely a symbol of life, joy, summertime, or energy. It is a force beyond taming. It does not relent, does not yield, does not enter into agreements. All that lives and endures organizes itself in relation to the Sun’s presence. We negotiate, then, not with the will of the Sun, but with its manifestations: light, warmth, radiation, seasonality, drought, shadow, plant growth, evaporation, fading, and the aging of materials.

It takes sunlight 499 seconds to reach Earth—not so long on a human scale, but long enough to unsettle the most fundamental understanding of the present. When we say “the Sun is now shining,” our forecast is already old news. Our “now” is lit by past light. We see the Sun as it was more than eight minutes ago. The warmth we become aware of has already been lingering on our skin. The present isn’t a moment. It is a perpetual delay: between the Sun sending out light, the Earth receiving it, and the body belatedly perceiving what the mind has yet to identify.

The exhibition delves into biology, architecture, matter, and politics—these solar negotiations do not unfold on a single plane. Taking part in the negotiations are the following artists: Ewa Babiarz, Przemek Branas, Viola Głowacka, Nicolas Grospierre, Izabella Jagiełło, Jakub Pionty Jezierski, Dominika Kowynia, Marta Niedbał, Maciek Salamon, Justyna Szarowska, Michał Szota, Anna Sztwiertnia, and Honza Zamojski, in evolving collaboration with the creators of the exhibition-situation’s permanent works. The Lifery is a natural setting for their works and for spinning tales of the Sun—not as a distant star, but as a force in relation to which one must constantly orientate the body, matter, diurnal rhythms, and the imagination of rest. Behold The Lifery’s east-facing windows for evidence of this!

The Lifery is under the Honorary Patronage of the Mayor of Wrocław.

A performance program and curatorial and author-led tour during the inauguration of “The Lifery exhibition-situation: Summer Season / Solar Negotiations” is organized as part of Wrocław Festival 2026.