Exhibition documentation
Herstory in many voices 19.02.-8.03.2026, Fundacja Alina, Warsaw
No one had lived in the wooden house for almost twenty years. The final cleaning, carried out just before its demolition, became both an act of care and a farewell. Visible traces of rural, female, and multicultural pasts—though constantly disappearing from the landscape—gain new readings and renewed strength.
Old Ukrainian embroidery patterns, eaten away by moth larvae, are restored through the quiet gesture of stitching. A fragment of polychromy that fell from the wall of an abandoned Greek Catholic church is preserved in the medium of a hand-woven textile. A Jewish sukkah from Izbica has survived.
Magdalena Ciemierkiewicz heard about the wartime violence that took place within the agricultural landscape of her home village when she was just a few years old. She attempts both to name and to move beyond multigenerational trauma. The works presented in the exhibition reveal this process from a forgotten mass grave in the fields, through Jewish architecture and fragments of Ukrainian ornamentation— remnants of a former multicultural borderland.
The artist traces the history of multiculturalism and historical threads that have been subjected to systematic erasure. Through these stories, she speaks of interpenetration and of a challenging yet necessary culture of coexistence. She reflects on the role of the contemporary witness, who need not remain passive.
The exhibition unfolds as a polyphonic narrative across multiple media, creating a non-obvious image of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland. While histories are still often written in national categories, the artist reaches for what emerges between worlds—what arises from everyday labor and what does not deserve to be forgotten. By recognizing these herstories, she grants them perspective, embodiment, and voice.
The exhibition constitutes a doctoral project carried out at the Doctoral School of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Supervisor: Prof. Andrzej Rysiński
Coordination: Dorota van Vugt, Antonina Gugała
Graphic design: Tomasz Stelmaski