Institutional loan · MOCAK Kraków, 2025
Nostalgia. Seekers of Fading Stars
MOCAK brought together twenty-two artists born between 1979 and 2001 and asked them about nostalgia. One painting went there from my collection, Agata Kus's Milenijny Bal Polonijny.
The show ran from 24 April to 14 September 2025 and was put together by Mirosława Bałazy and Martyna Sobczyk. It was about a generation that grew up assuming the world was steady and then got a pandemic, a war across the eastern border and inflation. Nostalgia turns up at moments like that not as sentiment but as shelter.
Milenijny Bal Polonijny fitted that brief exactly. Kus took the Polonia ball, one of the most tender images of Polishness abroad, and turned it into a montage: the figures look cut out of different years and pasted into a single uneasy frame. In the middle stands a man in a suit a size too big, nominally in the West already and still not at home there.
A few months later MOCAK showed House of Day, House of Night, thirty-three painters from the same collection.
A year later the same painting went to Sopot.