Managing the Unconscious – Kraken Exhibition Interview

Kraken. My father was a pharaoh and I had to kill him

Venue: Bałagan Gallery
Dates: December 6, 2025 – January 15, 2026
Curator: Piotr Kolanko

Artists:
Krzysztof Leon Dziemaszkiewicz (Berlin), performance

Visual artists:
Joanna Rusinek (Berlin), Filip Kalkowski (Berlin), Pichakorn Chukiew (Thailand), Vilma Leino (Helsinki), Krzysztof Leon Dziemaszkiewicz (Berlin), Piotr Kolanko, Adrianna Gajdziszewska, Zofia Gajewska, Kamila Majcher (very ugly plates), Piotr T. Mosur, Radim Koros, Marta Jamróg, Tomasz Rolniak, Jakub Sułecki, Magdalena Kościsz, Władysław Markowski, Zuzanna Romańska, Maciej Pęcak, Julia Celer, Seweryn Jański, Maja Maciejewska, Lidia Maslanka

Video art:
Jess MacCormack, Canek Zapata, Stanislav Pozhalov

Adrianna Gajdziszewska:

The figure of something that cannot be tamed, that lives beneath the line of perception — in your conception, is the Kraken an external monster: crisis, violence, systems, capitalism? Or rather an internal creature, a form of ontological anxiety characteristic of contemporary human experience?

Piotr Kolanko:

I think it is worth reversing the question: isn’t contemporary human anxiety itself the source of crises, violence, and tensions — ethnic, ideological, and economic? In one of my conversations with Maciej Pęcak, we arrived at the observation that one of the key human skills is the transformation of energy — the ability to translate one’s own “evil,” destruction, or aggression into a creative and constructive process.

This is, of course, our personal path, but it leads to an important conclusion: if we are able to consciously tame our own chaos and transform it into something good, then there is potential for the world — as a collective — to do the same.

This is precisely what I am trying to express through the figure of the Kraken. This monster is not an external threat that must be defeated, but a part of the psyche that we should not turn away from. It is about having the courage to descend beneath the surface, to touch places that are uncomfortable, dark, and unfamiliar. It is about working on oneself — a process that requires consistency, discipline, criticality, but also sensitivity and time.

Art helps with this. Meditation helps. Sleep helps. Sometimes psychedelic experience helps as well — anything that allows us to look beneath our own shell and find what wants to remain hidden.

AG:

How do you define the overall architecture of the exhibition in the context of research into the psyche, symbolism, and unconscious processes that form its thematic axis? In what way does it organize work with the unconscious and with the motif of “mess” or “disorder”?

PK:

I think the motif of ordering chaos will keep returning in my exhibitions. As long as I myself am managing mess, my exhibitions will be about managing mess. It is an accurate term, because these projects concern the segregation and ordering of the unconscious.

Returning to my conversations with Maciej Pęcak: he is concerned with finding personal topoi, archetypes, and orientation points within reality. Life contains many labyrinths and many waves that can sweep us away. That is why every conscious person must build their own reserve of symbols — a psychic map through which they navigate.

This exhibition opens up a broad process of diving into the psyche — collectively, through the works of the invited artists. The threads are highly diverse: autobiographical, mythological, civilizational; attempts to grasp the principles governing consciousness and the unconscious; as well as fantastic representations that analyze the unknown.

AG:

You bring together artists from Berlin, Helsinki, Thailand, and Poland. Is their common language aesthetics, trauma, realism, surrealism — or perhaps the rupture of rational narratives?

PK:

Neither trauma, realism, nor surrealism is their common language. Each artist creates from a different place.

For example, Pichakorn from Thailand paints realistic scenes from his own life. And yet, within our context, his painting — a man wearing a T-shirt that reads “Tomorrow” — becomes an ironic commentary on the human condition. When juxtaposed with more oneiric works, it creates an interesting accent within symbolic worlds, transporting us into the future as expectation, dream, fantasy — albeit experienced from a rather comfortable position.

The key was not one aesthetic or one movement. What is shared is a narrative about the psyche. For instance, Tomek Rolniak’s work — a vortex made of linoleum and carpet, with a protective stone resembling a Buddha at its center — is structural and geometric, yet filled with symbolic cues. Or Radim Koros’s work, inspired by a conversation with ChatGPT, about a model who does not exist. Zosia, in turn, creates an image of a figure that exists only as an internet joke, yet has acquired real influence.

There are many narratives here, and what connects them is relationality rather than a shared aesthetic.

AG:

You select works representing a wide range of media and artistic strategies. Could you elaborate on the logic behind these choices? Perhaps starting with performance as a point of departure.

PK:

Krzysztof Leon Dziemaszkiewicz appears here because his performances are full of energy, wildness, and symbolism. His transformations — from man to woman, through successive cycles of bodily and spiritual metamorphosis — resemble the ouroboros, endlessly devouring and rebirthing itself. Leon himself says that he does not consciously design the symbolism of his performances, which only confirms how strongly unconscious processes shape art.

We also have AI-video artists who have “grown” their own artificial intelligence models and created videos based on them. Rolniak’s installation occupies the entire gallery floor. There are works in steel, lamps resembling the Kraken, paintings, installations, Marta Jamróg’s painting, and photographs by Vilma Leino from Helsinki, who introduces us to surreal experiential worlds through hair and corporeality.

AG:

Your text clearly contains a psychoanalytic component. How should we understand the unconscious today, in a world where technology knows more about us than we know ourselves? Can art speak first?

PK:

Of course art can speak first. And in my opinion, it still does.

For anyone interested in this topic, I highly recommend Jung’s Rebis. Jung offers, among other things, a brilliant and humorous analysis of alchemists. He asks why they did what they did — since neither fake gold nor the philosopher’s stone was ever created, and their chemical discoveries were rather modest. Why did they persist so stubbornly in practicing alchemy and assigning it such importance?

Jung concludes that what mattered was engagement with matter that they did not understand. In the time of the alchemists, chemistry and natural sciences were poorly developed, so the realm of the unknown was vast. Onto this incomprehensible matter, alchemists projected unconscious contents — fantasies, spiritual experiences, fears, and desires. What they believed to be discoveries of the laws governing matter was, to a large extent, the unveiling of the structure of their own psyche. Matter became a projection screen for the unconscious.

Jung shows that something similar happened earlier with the Greeks gazing at the sky: constellations of gods, myths, stories — all of these were ways of describing the structure of the psyche rather than the actual properties of stars. The psyche was projected onto something not yet understood — the cosmos.

Now we arrive at the present day. The quantum world is today a similar realm of ignorance as the sky or the alchemical flask once were. We see a proliferation of “spiritual experts in quantum physics”: modern-day fortune tellers and healers who invoke quantum mechanics whenever they want to lend authority to something they cannot explain. Once again, the entire imaginary of the unconscious pours into this space — deities, principles, systems that supposedly arise from physics, but in reality are byproducts of the psyche.

Something very similar is happening today with technology and artificial intelligence. We project our fears, fantasies, and hopes onto AI as well. We would like it to diagnose us, understand us, perhaps even replace us — but at the current stage, these are still “just” algorithms, statistics, probabilities. Thanks to them, we can analyze mass tendencies, decisions, choices, and certain behavioral structures, but this is still data processing, not consciousness.

AG:

The motif of mess may suggest a gesture of distancing from established institutional frameworks. To what extent does this project enter into dialogue with institutional critique or establish its own model of operation?

PK:

I do not see Bałagan as a gesture of resistance toward institutions. I have nothing against institutions — provided they do their job well. And an institution’s job is done well when it reaches the public, when an exhibition lives through conversation, when it opens something up, educates, moves people, sometimes even shouts. Unfortunately, very few exhibitions in Poland actually fulfill these functions.

The problem is not institutions themselves, but their inability to compose narratives that have a real impact on audiences.

I am not interested in negotiating with institutional critique, because I do not see the need to position myself in opposition to it. That is not my role. Of course, if such a necessity arises, I can assume that position — but it is neither my intention nor my direction.

Interview on the Restart magazine website