The Millions of Lives

What if Icarus, upon reaching the sun, discovered an unimaginable truth—not only about the nature of the sun itself, which turned out to be cold and angular, but above all about the nature of his own imaginings? It was they that caused him to burn long before reaching his destination. What happens when we cross the boundary of fear? The horizon begins to settle. The primordial storm and chaos give way to an emerging order. The world assumes its superposition, and we find ourselves in a place that no one had seen before—or that only a chosen few had ever been granted the chance to witness.   As the Polish rapper Pezet once said: “When I was falling, I wasn’t really falling, because I had learned how to fly.” Here, this line becomes not merely a commentary, but the axis around which the entire story revolves. This is an alternative story of Icarus, who, in falling, discovered another world—wild and exotic, yet at the same time familiar and primordial. The place he arrived at, however, was not the place he had set out to reach. . The walk on the edge of the sun Adrianna GajdziszewskaTwarda Sztuka, Curator and Visual

Good is the enemy of better In this exhibition, I present a new body of work made primarily from steel. It is a material I grew up with. My father ran a company producing steel machinery and structures, and the industrial district of Jasło, centered around Towarowa Street, remains one of the defining landscapes of my childhood. When I think back to the 1990s, I see construction sites, cranes, industrial halls, and prefabricated concrete factories. I remember the atmosphere of transformation, the arrival of Western goods, the first pizza restaurants, Turbo chewing gum, and Caro cigarettes. It was a moment when Poland was becoming colorful, and steel seemed to embody the material of the future. For my father, steel primarily served a practical function. What mattered were its strength, elasticity, technical properties, and durability. Raw steel was considered unfinished — it had to be protected, painted, and preserved against the passage of time. I see something entirely different in it. Hot-rolled steel, in particular, possesses an almost painterly quality. Its surface is marked by discolorations, traces of heat, and reflections that resemble oil stains. Steel absorbs time, reacts to touch, and records scratches and changes. It becomes a carrier of