At the invitation of the artist Joanna Fluder and curator Michalina Sablik, we had a pleasure of designing the exhibition “Slime”. The selection of 140 gouaches on paper and canvas from recent years together with the premiere installations “The Giantess” and “The Temple of Dormant Vegetation”, dedicated to the Zachęta National Gallery of Art space, were a great design challenge.
THE GIANTESS
The first room of the exhibition space is the place of the Giantess – a 7-meter-tall snail woman who has left her shell and is crawling towards sensation. She is the heroine of paintings and a landscape – an installation that you can interact with, touch, hug, lie on, and rest on. The delicate, airy, slightly pearlescent fabric symbolizes an empty shell and marks the place for the snail woman. Around the Giantess, gouache paintings on canvas hang on the dark walls of the room.
We designed the Giantess Room as a place of calm and rest. It is a space that envelops you, where you can crawl in for a moment and immerse yourself in it.
We designed the Giantess Room as a place of calm and rest. It is a space that envelops you, where you can crawl in for a moment and immerse yourself in it.
FOLLOW THE SNAIL TRAILS
We arranged the gouaches on paper in linear arrangements and completed them with Joanna Fluder's winding texts. The texts and titles of the works poetically add context to the endless series of works. We designed the inscriptions based on a study of snail slime trails. The exhibition is complemented by folk wooden benches, whose shape refers to the elongated bodies of insects inhabiting Joanna's gouaches and to the artist's sculptures made of sticks washed up by the sea and papier-mâché.
THE TEMPLE OF DORMANT VEGETATION
“Temple of Dormant Vegetation” is an installation created especially for Zachęta National Art Gallery. We designed it based on two overlapping hemispheres, referring to the shell-greenhouse that shelters Joanna's sculptures. The delicate, misty fabric was sewn using the Fibonacci sequence (longitudinal stitching).
behind the scenes
Exhibition designers: Matylda Halkowicz, Marta Szostek
Artist: Joanna Fluder
Curator: Michalina Sablik
Production: Dominika Kaszewska, Alicja Sznjader, Karolina Jezierska-Pomorska, Anna Muszyńska
Installation: Andrzej Bialik, Dariusz Bochenek, Remigiusz Olszewski, Grzegorz Ostromecki, Paweł Ostromecki
Objects in the exhibition made by: Bartek Buczek, Jakub Jaździk, Jacek Winiarski, Zofia Kuluza, Agnieszka Mierzejewska
Technological partnership: Dekoma
Photo: Maciej Landsberg, Marta Szostek
Zachęta National Gallery of Art 2025