Through Rose-Coloured Screens: An Interview with Malta Biennale Polish Pavilion Creators Weronika Zalewska & Ada Piekarska

Ada-Piekarska-and-Weronika-Zalewska-C-Alicja-Lesiak-for-Adam-Mickiewicz-Institute.jpg, default, From left: Ada Piekarska, Weronika Zalewska; photo: Alicja Lesiak

#photography & visual arts

At the Malta Biennale this year, Weronika Zalewska and Ada Piekarska turn a familiar TV game-show format into something sharper and stranger: a meditation on how post-1989 Poland learned to see itself, what it chose to forget, and why the promise of ‘catching up with the West’ still haunts the present.

The conceptual framework for this year’s Malta Biennale is encapsulated in the phrase: ‘Clean, Clear, Cut’. When announcing it exactly a year ago, curator Rosa Martinez spoke of contemporary crises that demand an artistic narrative: of toxic disinformation, of pollution (not only of the environment, but also of ethics), of the need for critical reflection on the past and analysis of the present.

If anyone listened to her with the utmost attention, it was undoubtedly the Polish duo: curator Ada Piekarska, primarily associated with the Bielska BWA Gallery, and the audiovisual artist Weronika Zalewska. Their video installation Archive of Hesitations, consisting mainly of two contrasting film installations, takes its cue from television’s beloved game show – a format that only ostensibly presents objective knowledge, but in reality simplifies reality and shapes social perceptions.

Although Zalewska and Piekarska’s project is set against the backdrop of Poland’s transformation, it speaks in a decidedly broader, universal way about the mechanisms shaping memory and morality, and about how generations growing up in the 1990s and 2000s learned about the world from the television screen.

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‘Archive of Hesitations’ by Weronika Zalewska, video installation, curated by Ada Piekarska, Polish Pavilion at the Malta Biennale 2026, photo: Jakub Celej / IAM

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Sylwia Niemczyk: The opening words of the curator’s introduction to your project read: ‘“The Archive of Hesitations” was conceived around artist Weronika Zalewska’s personal memory of watching television with her grandmother in the early 21st century’. What was so special about that experience?

Weronika Zalewska: In those shared evenings spent on the sofa, I notice a peculiar blend of a carefree childhood and intense politicisation, which was also shaped by popular culture. As I was growing up, the world of globalisation was entering our lives through the television, and yet our teenage years are a time when our own political views first take shape; a time when we draw heavily on what is conveyed to us then. With the remote control in our hands, we were like sponges.

I remember that back then we were far more inclined to listen to television broadcasts than to teachers and parents, not to mention priests. We had unconditional trust in it and were drawn to American culture. We believed in what was called freedom, neutrality, and expertise. And since my artistic work involves venturing into the realm of artistic research, I wanted to take a closer look at those times and how they shaped me.

SN: Before you tell us more, can you share more about your research?

WZ: These are creative processes that draw on a combination of artistic and scientific tools. They incorporate the methodology of artistic experimentation and exploration into a rather narrow spectrum of what is referred to as research, learning and exchange. It is actually quite amusing to talk about this, adapting one’s language to a certain norm. Intuitively, however, we know that art can guide us through a spectrum of narratives, experiences or socio-political analyses.

In my view, the creation of the Archive of Hesitations – which required work on archives or an analysis of the language we used in the post-transformation era – is a kind of sociological research-record, though it may not fit within its traditional framework. And it does not fit within them because it is intimate, poetic, non-linear and rather dangerously elusive to scientific metrics, even though I check my sources diligently.

I believe that bringing together, under the umbrella of artistic research, fields such as autoethnography, political analysis and poetry can offer a different perspective. In today’s humanities, grounding oneself in one’s own experience, rather than focusing solely on – after all, illusory – objectivity, is highly valuable. Feminism, anti-colonial thought and poetry teach us this. The non-minorities, the non-excluded, have been able to pretend to be ‘objective’ or represent ‘the general public’ for a very long time, thereby flattening reality. We can only weave history through the diversity of personal experiences.

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‘Archive of Hesitations’ by Weronika Zalewska, video installation, curated by Ada Piekarska, Polish Pavilion at the Malta Biennale 2026, photo: Jakub Celej / IAM

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WZ: For quite some time now, I have been fascinated by both the lingering afterimages of what is at times almost erotic excitement in the face of Americanised entertainment culture, and the world of politics. The longer I thought about it, the more clearly I saw how much the discourses of that time, reaching us via television, shaped the ethics we still use today. By analysing television programming, one can discern the mechanisms through which Poland, during the transition period, reaffirmed its becoming part of the West.

I was also intrigued by the area of exclusion. Subtle, taking place between the lines, imposed slowly. Both class-based – the belittling of workers’ voices, the myth of individual success, resentment towards the communal – and racial. I believe we have not sufficiently addressed the issue of building national identity on a certain definition of ‘defending civilisation’ against the ‘other’, shaped after 9/11 and now bearing fruit in headlines concerning Palestine, Lebanon and Iran in virtually all mainstream media.

In the Archive of Hesitations I didn’t want to present only negative images of those times, but I did want to draw attention to the mechanisms – which remain relevant today in the context of social media – that, under the colourful guise of entertainment and freedom, smuggled in divisive content, whilst passing off the opinions of rating agency experts as ‘knowledge’.

I was also interested in how I had been led to believe that I was an American teenager – facing the same problems as them and living in the same reality as them. Drawing on an endless stream of content – because the early 21st century also marked the advent of 24/7 television in Poland – I believed I was part of a safe, socially liberal universe. Of course, it undoubtedly gave me vast access to culture. It offered plenty of fun, references, inspiration and respite – including from Catholic school. But at the same time, as a young teenager, I believed that Poland’s involvement in the wars in the Middle East was beyond question. Bearded men became, albeit an absent presence, a bogeyman capable of emerging from anywhere and at any moment. Alternative perspectives were not available to me back then. Anyway, what is the situation today – with the possibility of other perspectives, hesitations, and questioning within society or within algorithms?

Ada Piekarska: I’m a bit older than Weronika, but I have the same memories. I remember how, a few days after the attacks of 11th September 2001, our maths teacher asked us to raise our hands if we were in favour of the invasion of Iraq. And most of us did raise our hands. I was in the first year of secondary school at the time; raising our hands wasn’t based on our convictions, but on what we’d seen on the telly and what we’d absorbed from it.

And just like Weronika, when I was a teenager and my political and social views were taking shape, I went through a phase of being captivated by neoliberal ideas. Opportunities are all around me, you just have to reach out and grab them; everyone is the architect of their own destiny. I certainly didn’t pick up these beliefs at home; my dad had completely different views. I remember that when he spoke of social solidarity, trade unionism, and the protests of the 1970s and 1980s, I considered his words naive and outdated. And I mention this because what I find particularly interesting about Archive of Hesitations is that it reveals not only individual artistic reflection but also a certain generational experience.

She creates using various media: video, text, sound and collective actions, and her art revolves around themes of socio-economic transformation and their impact on the production of cultural narratives and relationships.

SN: Will you share some of the behind the scenes: how did you end up working together?

AP: When I was invited to curate the Polish Pavilion, I wrote to Weronika – and only to her – with the invitation. I knew what framework Rose Martinez had set out, and from the start I was certain that Weronika’s work would fit within it. I was familiar with her artistic interests and working methods; I knew she worked in the field of audiovisual arts, and that was precisely the form I wanted to present. The Polish Pavilion at the Malta Biennale is a major event for Polish art. I wanted it to offer a meaningful reflection, so that it wouldn’t be merely an aesthetic affair: a bauble on a Christmas tree designed to make an impression. I hold many Polish artists in high regard; I can’t quite explain why I thought of Weronika straight away. Perhaps I’ll refer here to the affective knowledge mentioned in the Archive….

WZ: When Ada spoke to me, I didn’t have a finished project in mind, just a vague idea. Afterimages of watching television, absorbing globalised content, which were intertwined with memories of spending a lot of time with my grandmother, who, incidentally, had never been abroad. I know very little about my grandmother, her life, her childhood – not because it was some sort of secret, but simply because that’s how it turned out. Grandmothers – at least those outside the elite, with less established cultural capital – often believe they have nothing interesting or valuable to pass on, especially to a granddaughter or grandson who are soaking up the world, speaking other languages, and are glued to their phones today, as they once were to the television. My time with her usually consisted of sitting together, chatting, and eating treats. It was a time of pleasure, but also of unspoken heartbreak. Hence the idea of a TV format. Although at first, instead of a game show, I had planned something closer to a debate between experts.

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‘Archive of Hesitations’ by Weronika Zalewska, video installation, curated by Ada Piekarska, Polish Pavilion at the Malta Biennale 2026, photo: Jakub Celej / IAM

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SN: So why did you end up choosing a game show?

AP: It is a format that is recognised internationally and across generations. Everyone knows the rules; they know it’s all about questions and answers, and that when answering, you have to stick to a strict format. It’s clear that the aim is to win, to beat the others. For viewers, this element of competition – rather than co-operation – is very appealing.

WZ: Our game show features three characters who are somewhat stereotypical, as is often the case in real game shows. There is, for example, a librarian from a small village who, when introducing herself, doesn’t mention the name of the village she comes from, saying that there’s no point anyway, as nobody knows where it is. .

AP: We wanted to show that television formats are incapable of capturing the full scope of human experience; they are built on simplifications, exaggerations and limitations. It is a common trope in television to highlight certain traits whilst leaving others in the shadows.

WZ: We also highlight another important aspect characteristic of television: a certain grey area between a harmless joke and an insult or belittlement. Looking back today at programmes from the 2000s, I can see their entertainingly violent nature. As a little girl, I probably laughed along with the chauvinistic or classist jokes myself. As a society, we have deeply internalised many of them and express them in our everyday conversations or in the way we vote. We may still perceive many of them as ‘neutral’.

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‘Archive of Hesitations’ by Weronika Zalewska, video installation, curated by Ada Piekarska, Polish Pavilion at the Malta Biennale 2026, photo: Jakub Celej / IAM

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SN: The core of your installation consists of two films. The first is a game show, but the second film, situated in the second room of the Polish Pavilion, is a non-linear montage of dreamlike scenes. Watching it, one gets the impression of learning something, yet at the same time, something seems to slip away.

WZ: The second video explores a certain opacity within which we, too, exist, even though our access to it is limited. The film draws us into what lies hidden within this opacity and what we can glean from these barely perceptible fragments, traces of history, and tenuous connections. There exists a certain, unnameable realm of knowledge based on intimate human and more-than-human exchange, on mindfulness, listening, engaging with multi-layeredness, with poetry. This is not something we can fit into a table. I wanted to take a closer look at this knowledge – affective, elusive, intergenerational.

I do not wish to romanticise the time before the transformation, or even earlier, the pre-Communist era. Connections and fractures have always existed and do not function solely within the framework of political systems. Ada and I wanted to highlight the value of other ways of transmitting knowledge – grassroots, and also non-verbal. Their ‘transmission’, their frequencies, far and deep beyond the framework of a/b/c/d, beyond the stopwatch. Hence the earthiness and strange rhythms in our second film, hence the gestures, the empty houses, hence the percussion or bass string that you can feel in your body.

AP: Right from the start, from my very first conversations with Weronika, this project was, for me, primarily about models of knowledge and the regimes within which it is produced. And it is impossible to talk about knowledge without talking about less tangible things, such as time and memory. These are inseparable areas that must be analysed simultaneously, in a single test tube.

WZ: I wanted to present something dreamlike in this second room of the Pavilion – something difficult to describe, yet undeniably real. A knowledge of immense power, yet fragile in the face of the top-down communication system embodied by the game show format. The dreamlike quality of this second film – referring to dreams or imaginings – suggests that nowadays we have less and less space to encounter our true selves. This space, in which we can commune with something elusive, turn the established order on its head, question, and feel, is shrinking under the influence of the sheer volume of messages and stimuli.

AP: The installation is aptly titled Archive of Hesitations. The second video is no longer bound by any paradigm that expects an answer to a specific question. Here, there is room for error, for hesitation, for silence. Unlike on a game show. Although, due to the architecture of the pavilion, we are showing them in separate rooms, we treat both films as part of the same installation. It is likely that the next exhibition, which will take place later this year at the Bielska BWA Gallery, will be arranged differently in architectural terms.

SN: Are the two videos like two sides of the same coin: oppressive and non-oppressive, good and bad, alien and familiar?

AP: You could interpret it that way, but that wasn’t our intention – we didn’t want to rely on the logic of opposition. The two experiences are inseparable. Such a dichotomy is a false distinction; our aim was to show the co-existence, or even the interdependence, of the two systems.

WZ: The second video is a gesture indicating that non-dogmatic knowledge also exists. Certain aspects of it are largely inaccessible to us within the contemporary logic of capital, and indeed the exploitation of our imagination. We weren’t interested in presenting a good or bad hero here, but rather in recognising mindfulness as a peculiar, contradictory protagonist who guides us through life, all too often ‘on autopilot’. Hence our hesitations…

SN: I asked about this because I was wondering whether *Archive of Hesitations* might be interpreted as a critique of Western discourse, which is based in science and evidence.

WZ: Or rather, a critique of pseudo-science, of spurious evidence, often distorted and corrupted. The biggest bankers – acting as government experts. The falsehood of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in a given country – presented as fact. Society, the communal sphere – portrayed as a transparent myth, a commune. It is a call for critical thinking, for both incisive expertise and an ear for grassroots experiences. One of the quiz participants, a mechanic by trade, mentions at one point the workers’ strikes of the 1990s. Today they are a repressed history, yet they could serve as a link between the Solidarity era and the present day.

The things we are told are part of a certain ethos, a political strategy. My aim was to show how the elements of the historical and political narrative that reach us are curated. Today, this is done not only by governments but also by large corporations, often with the two working in tandem. It is important to check sources and to talk; then a/b/c/d will quickly fall apart for us. No grandmother’s anecdote fits into the logic of AI. When someone tells a story, something completely different happens.

AP: What is significant in the Archive is the introduction of the concept of affective, emotional knowledge. So we are not talking about what is better or worse, but we point out, for example, that affective knowledge is ready to reveal the conditions of its production. It does not pretend to be objective and transparent, which contrasts with the knowledge presented in a game show.

I will return to television programming in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the framework of our morality was taking shape – and when children in schools raised their hands, voting in favour of the invasion of Iraq. The ideology that shaped that kind of knowledge was communicated as objective and neutral. So, in a sense of a certain honesty, affective knowledge is, after all, something better. We encounter such knowledge, for example, when our great-grandmothers speak of how they themselves remember the war. When they recount what happened to them.

WZ: Today, social media platforms serve us up a mixed bag: one moment a video of someone making pancakes, the next a kitten, the next the bombing of Ukraine. Of course, we often connect through them, including in our activism, but they usually lead us towards a sense of powerlessness and alienation. The content plays on our emotions, our fatigue; it toys with our attention and fabricates truths. At this pace of information flow, hesitation and questioning are almost impossible to practise, yet they harbour explosive potential. This is as old as the hills, or at least as old as Socrates.

SN: Your installation includes curtains printed with excerpts from Weronika’s poems. What role do they play?

AP: Because they are semi-transparent, they – much like our second video – refer to the elusive. At the same time, they reflect what lies before them, somewhat like a mirror. We wanted the exhibition visitors to be able to immerse themselves in this elusiveness, so that their participation would not consist merely of watching the video.

The fact that the poetry is fragmentary, that it does not immediately catch the eye, is a key feature of our entire installation. I imagined that the moment when a viewer stumbles upon it unexpectedly would be far more interesting and meaningful than if it were to appear before them the moment they entered the pavilion.

WZ: In a way, she also links the two films. I write about memories, afterimages from my childhood and teenage years; I try to capture the elusive. I’ve always been struck by something Audre Lorde, the American poet and essayist, once said: that throughout history, places of poeticism and nuance have had to hide in order to survive, and so they are accessible only in shadows, in fragments. Through my poems, I try to peer into those fragments.

SN: To conclude, Weronika, I’d like to return to the figure of your grandmother, who was a constant presence throughout your childhood. Otherwise, you’d probably have watched TV with your dad or your friends. You mention her in the description, but she isn’t featured in either of the videos.

WZ: But she’s certainly very much present in my poems. At first, I thought our video installation would also feature my grandmother’s voice, but I decided against it. She’s a huge part of my life, and that’s something I want to keep to myself.

It’s a very interesting topic for another conversation – what aspects of our own lives we convey in artistic projects. For me, intimacy means sticking to the text and not recording my grandmother’s image or voice, so as not to take them to a place foreign to her. This isn’t the right time; it’s too fragile.

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