Rafał Zajko

Rafał Zajko "Jajko/The Egg Egg - an Exhibition in IX Acts"
Arsenał Gallery, Białystok, Poland
Curator : Tomek Pawłowski-Jarmołajew

"The Egg Egg is a deliberately split organism, a double archive staged as a single system. The exhibition operates through a temporal pairing: forty recent works by Rafał Zajko, produced over the last eight years, are interwoven with forty historical works from the hosting institution’s collection dating from 1960–1990. Rather than presenting history as background or influence, the show treats both bodies as co-active agents inside the same apparatus.

By staging both sets together, the exhibition collapses linear art-historical time. The years 1960–1990 and the last eight years coexist inside a single, looping present, mirroring the exhibition’s central claim that time no longer moves cleanly forward but circulates, repeats, and recombines. The visitor moves through the show not as a chronological observer, but as a participant inside an ongoing feedback loop between past infrastructures and present subjectivities.

Ultimately, The Egg Egg positions the institution itself as part of the work. Its archive is not neutral storage but an active reproductive system.

It becomes about inheritance, custody, and what it means to work inside a history you did not choose but cannot escape."

ACT I - Prologue