Patrycja Orzechowska

Patrycja Orzechowska’s inquiries revolve around working with people and objects from the Archaeological Museum—the Nowa Huta–Branice branch, extending the artist’s most recent interests connected with the archaeology of both the past and the future, object-oriented ontology, digging into the ground, and reaching toward what remains hidden. Rather than producing new materialities, her attention and activity are directed toward existing objects selected from the museum’s collection.

The digital reproductions of photographs documenting archaeological work—afterimages of excavations, fragments of the past extracted from the earth—reveal themselves in an unexpected location. Orzechowska transforms the foyer of the representative assembly hall of the former Administrative Centre of the Nowa Huta metallurgical complex into a site of contemplation, where time loses its linearity and matter gains a voice. Meetings give way to silent objects that speak the language of discontinuity, emptiness, and tenderness toward that which, though past, remains present within the structure of things. The project reinterprets the space in the spirit of a quiet revolution of memory—not through confrontation, but through gestures of material contemplation.

Mounted on brass legs recalling both laboratory stands and alchemical structures, the artist places inverted matrices of landscape—forms evoking the shapes of archaeological sites. The inversion of formal logic becomes a metaphor for a gap, an absence, a trace. The earth from which objects were extracted itself becomes a vessel—a container for time. Accompanying these are original artefacts—fragments and remnants unearthed in the area of today’s Nowa Huta, drawn from the collections of the Archaeological Museum in Kraków—as well as ceramic vessels made by the artist, on whose surfaces she inscribes the history of their lives: from wholeness, through processes of decay, displacement, and loss, to a new reassembly.

The axis of the installation is formed by a 15-metre-long Jacquard tapestry, a collage composed of archival documentation of vessel fragments and photographs of museum employees bent in gestures of care over the recovered remnants. The remains undergo careful washing, matching, and gluing. A fabric woven from images of incomplete vessels originating from a folder titled Complete Vessels becomes an endless stream of matter, a chronicle of shards, a fold in time. Suspended horizontally above the viewers’ heads, it unspools like a filmstrip in which image and time are inseparably entwined. It transforms raw visual documentation into a sensuous and poetic medium—an affective archive.