Natalia Sielewicz

Opening day at the Estonian Pavilion on May 6 ✨ Thank you to everyone who joined us for the opening of The House of Leaking Sky at the 61st Venice Biennale. In the pavilion, Merike Estna transforms the exhibition space into an open studio, painting on site throughout the Biennale while the work gradually develops in public view. Alongside the live painting, there is a large-scale floor painting made from more than 25,000 glazed ceramic tiles. During the opening, speeches were given by artist Merike Estna, curator Natalia Sielewicz, commissioner Maria Arusoo, and Estonian Minister of Culture Heidy Purga. Estonian Pavilion is open until 22 November, everyone is warmly welcome to visit! Photos: Agne Raceviciute

Defrost with @nikita.kadan @siele_witch by 📷 @karolgrygoruk for the next #baltictriennial at @smcvilnius Stay tuned for the prologue event in June

💔 „Maria Jarema. Pęknięty modernizm” to jedna z trzech wystaw, na którą zaprosimy Was już 20 marca. 👀 Proponujemy nowe spojrzenie na twórczość jednej z najbardziej oryginalnych postaci polskiej sztuki nowoczesnej okresu międzywojennego i powojennego. Od początku kariery artystycznej Jarema identyfikowała się z międzynarodowym nurtem modernizmu, przejmując język wspólny dla abstrakcji postkubistycznej i czerpiąc z surrealizmu i ekspresjonizmu. ✊ W okresie powojennym radykalnie domagała się wolności artystycznej. Łącząc charakterystyczną dla surrealizmu koncentrację na cielesności i autoekspresji z dążeniem do formalnej autonomii sztuki abstrakcyjnej, Jarema od 1949 roku rozpoczęła eksperymenty z techniką monotypii. To właśnie ta technika umożliwiała jej artykulację podmiotu jako całości, obejmując także to, co pozornie niemożliwe do pogodzenia – obszary pęknięć i rozdarć, naznaczone zarówno napięciami wewnętrznymi, jak i zewnętrznymi. 💔 Kuratorzy określają wypracowany przez nią idiom mianem „pękniętego modernizmu”. Twórczość artystki można czytać jako badanie różnych sytuacji, w jakich znajduje się ciało i podmiot: od doświadczenia jednostki, przez relacje między dwojgiem ludzi, rodzinę, aż po funkcjonowanie w szerszej wspólnocie. Wystawa jest zaaranżowana według tej narastającej skali – jednostka, para, rodzina, wielość, pokazując, jak w obrazach ciała ujawniają się napięcia społeczne oraz procesy rozpadu i pęknięcia podmiotu. Kuratorzy: Éric de Chassey, Natalia Sielewicz 🖤 Nasi partnerzy: Muzeum jest instytucją prowadzoną przez @miasto_warszawa i @kultura_gov_pl Partner Strategiczny: @audipl Mecenas Muzeum i Kolekcji: EY Partner Muzeum: @przyjacielemsn i @purohotels Partner Kina: @eonpolska Partner Edukacji: @fundacja.efc Partner Prawny: Kancelaria DZP Partnerzy medialni: Polskie Radio, PAP, Zwierciadło, Vogue, Onet, Wyborcza.pl, Wysokie Obcasy, Pismo 📸 Maria Jarema, Penetracje I, 1957, tempera, monotypia na papierze przyklejonym na płótnie, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź zdjęcie Jaremy dzięki uprzejmości rodziny #muzeumsztukinowoczesnejwwarszawie #muzeum #jarema

Oh Valie, Valie..thank you for teaching us about Invisible Adversaries. Valie Export (1940-2026) 💔

Some favourite incantations and monuments by Beverly Buchanan from the main exhibition in Venice. While spirituality and memory are often evoked in relation to her practice, to me her work also represents a deep materialist reckoning with structures of social consciousness and survival. It is about the act of remaining and a means of reappearance, as Rebecca Schneider would write in scripting the archive as bone (that which remains) to performance’s flesh (that which slips away): “In the archive, flesh is given to be that which slips away. Flesh can house no memory of bone. Only bone speaks memory of flesh. Flesh is blindspot.” When I look at Beverly Buchanan’s anti-monumental monuments, there is no loud triumphalism, no heroic fanfare, and yet they still hold a profound resistance to disappearance. The artist once wrote that many of her pieces contain the word “ruins” in their titles because “that tells you this object has been through a lot and survived.” The force of these object-prayers lies precisely in their minor register. #beverlybuchanan @madamekoyo

Before falling asleep on the plane back home from Venice, I found myself trying to make sense of a lingering feeling after encountering Danish pavilion by @habitual_body_monitoring2 and @the_chus_martinez (I loved it) Giorgio Agamben once wrote that the profanation of the unprofanable is the political task of the coming generation. Written over 20 yars ago, this idea feels newly urgent—perhaps because a younger generation of artists is rethinking it in relation to how desire is produced and circulated today in the times of fascism (I am thinking also of @floholzinger @yaremaandkhimei @sungtieu @angelidakis in the context of this biennale In a highly libidinal economy—what Preciado described once as the pharmacopornographic regime—images do more than affect us; they organize and extract from us. The living body in the 21st century is what the factory was in the 19th century: the central site of political struggle. This becomes palpable in Maja’s work, which addresses not only what is visible, modes of representatio etc but also what lies beneath the skin: the “heated factory,” where libido and psyche perform their labor. I was struck to learn that Denmark is the world’s largest exporter of sperm, catering to a global appetite for “Viking” genes. The convergence of market, bodily optimization, and extractivism recalled a conversation I once had with a Polish midwife, who described how in the heyday of early capitalism in Warsaw placentas were covertly sold to Western beauty companies seeking stem cells—then, as now, among the most desired materials in the cosmetics industry. There’s a poetry in the dialectic between the vulnerable men in music scenes and the fact that the actresses stare back at the viewer with a penetrating judgement and confidence rather than vulnerability, as if they do not intend to comply with the spectator and their desire. Really cool tension. Congrats to @habitual_body_monitoring2 and @the_chus_martinez 🧬🔬

Experiencing Canicula on the last day of my stay in Venice was a beautiful reminder that, against the excessive violence of technocapitalist regimes—their AI sloppiness and obscenities—the moving image still holds one of the most profound possibilities for rewiring our synapses: from alienation toward collective, immediate presence; heavy, textured, and uncompromised, rooted in the viewer’s own embodied perception. Maybe we need to reclaim former spaces of monumental devotion and power in our cities and transform them into spell machines for our ghosts and griefs. Since children in Victorian times lit up their rooms with toy magic lanterns, cinema has always functioned as a machine for tactile hallucination. Seeing this carefully curated exhibition made me wonder how we might still reclaim cinema from the bastardized image economies of online slop. As Jalal Toufic writes on Hiroshima Mon Amour, every love contains within it the horizon of the world’s destruction; cinema seems to operate on that very same threshold — between intimacy and catastrophe, apparition and erasure. Immersed in these installations, I found myself thinking about different regimes of seeing, and about Maggie Nelson’s definition of morality: “So far as I can tell, most worthwhile pleasures on this earth slip between gratifying another and gratifying oneself. Some would call that an ethics.” This tension becomes particularly apparent in the negotiations of gaze, invocation, and identification within the works of @janisrafa , @lawrenceabuhamdan , and @yaremaandkhimei What kinds of alternative affects — beyond those tethered to suffering — remain available to subjects in pain? How do media and liberal culture police the representation of victimhood? And how do we summon ghosts without reducing them to spectacle? What I also loved was the way abstraction and testimony entered into dialogue with one another, shaping the dramaturgy of the exhibition as a whole. Silence/ abstraction did not function as absence, but as pressure or residue. Half way through my camera died so not much of a docu, probably for the better. Congrats @leonardobigazzi @alessandro.rabottini and to all artists

Sunny moments with La Familia of The House of Leaking Sky - artist @merikeestna & architect @diogopassarinhostudio Please come to our opening of the @estonianpavilion_merikeestna today - Wednesday, May 6 at 3 pm. There will be drinks, food, free hugs and performance by @jaimelobatocardoso and @albertocerro We are located on the grounds of a community centre, in a converted church just off Garibaldi and Giardini where a small pocket of Venetian life spills beyond the Biennale façade. In her work, Merike has always pushed the idea of painting as something that might extend beyond its formal boundaries—something that can remain unfinished, or require ongoing care rather than being turned into an object of consumption. This is perhaps how we should imagine world-making today: as a labour of maintenance that moves toward open-endedness, a slow choreography of care and attention—something our world desperately needs right now. @estonianpavilion_merikeestna

Merike Estna (@merikeestna ) begins a monumental 22-canvas painting at the Estonian Pavilion, working on it daily throughout the entire duration of @labiennale . Curated by Natalia Sielewicz (@siele_witch ), the pavilion becomes an immersive open studio, bringing the often unseen labour of painting into full view. Join us today, 6 May at 3pm for a live performance and drinks reception. 📍Calle San Domenico 1285 @estonianpavilion_merikeestna @ccaestonia #BiennaleArte2026 #EstonianPavilion

Co kryje się pod pojęciem „Pękniętego modernizmu” i o tym dlaczego warto sięgnąć po nasz najnowszy katalog, opowiada Natalia Sielewicz – współkuratorka wystawy i współredaktorka publikacji „Maria Jarema. Pęknięty modernizm” / „Maria Jarema. Cracked Modernism” W środku znajdziecie eseje wybitnych badaczek i badaczy twórczości Jaremianki – Agnieszki Daukszy, Doroty Jareckiej, Luizy Nader, Joanny Kordjak, Małgorzaty Dziewulskiej, Barbary Ilkosz oraz redaktorów (Natalii Sielewicz i Érica de Chassey), które nie tylko analizują fenomen artystki, ale przede wszystkim rzucają nowe światło na jej walkę o autonomię sztuki w czasach opresji. To lektura, która pozwala zrozumieć, dlaczego Jarema pozostaje dziś tak boleśnie aktualna. 👉 Majówka w mieście? Wpadnij do Księgarni – katalog czeka na Ciebie. 👉 Swój egzemplarz możesz też zamówić online na stronie Muzeum. #wydawnictwomsn #msnwarszawa #mariajarema #msklep #katalogdowystawy

The catalogue for Maria Jarema: Cracked Modernism is finally out—in both English and Polish. Co-edited by Éric de Chassey and Natalia Sielewicz, it offers a fresh perspective on the work of one of the most original figures in Polish modern art. Jarema’s uncompromising practice continues to inspire bold interpretations, and we are grateful to all the contributors and everyone involved in bringing this project to life. Published to coincide with our exhibition at @msnwarszawa , the book is richly illustrated and includes contributions by Éric de Chassey, myself, @agnieszka_dauksza , Małgorzata Dziewulska, Barbara Ilkosz, Dorota Jarecka, @kordjakjoanna and Luiza Nader. The album section follows an escalating scale—singles, doubles, family, and multitude—according to which we have arranged the exhibition, illustrating how social tensions, as well as processes of fragmentation and rupture of the subject, emerge in representations of the self in Maria Jarema’s work. Edited by: @ericdechassey and myself Designed by: @ludovic_balland @gosiastolinska Managing editors: Łukasz Mojsak, @kasiaszotkowska @wydawnictwo_msn

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