Inside Job (Ula Lucińska, Michał Knychaus)

The Inside Job duo creates multi-elemental spatial installations combining sculptural objects, textiles and site-specific works.

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Ula Lucińska & Michał Knychaus of the Inside Job collective, photo: ulalucinska.com

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The Inside Job collective was created by Ula Lucińska (b. 1992) and Michał Knychaus (b. 1987) in 2016. The two began working together during their studies at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań.

Lucińska studied stage design and fashion design, whilst Knychaus studied graphic design. Both graduated from the Faculty of Intermedia. Their joint final-year project, Overwrite/Discard/Save Both (2018), was recognised by art and culture magazines such as SZUM, Contemporary Lynx and Czas Kultury. Lucińska and Knyhaus remained associated with the university even after graduating, running a one-year guest studio at the Faculty of Intermedia, where they implemented their own programme called Landscapes of the Future.

The starting point for many of their projects are specific places and landscapes: post-industrial sites, transitional zones, and spaces undergoing intense transformation. The observations, materials and stories they gather find their way into their work often in an indirect manner – through speculation, associations or fictional shifts. They treat the transformations they explore not only as a source of unease, but also as fields revealing new potential, new forms of relationship, imagination or continuity. In their work, Inside Job analyse moments when existing orders lose their stability, as well as the forms of life and relationships that emerge amidst turbulent change. They are interested in the processes occurring at the intersection of ecology and technology, as well as the ways in which landscapes, infrastructures and organisms adapt to the changing conditions of the future.

Their pieces are mainly made of metals – steel and aluminium – and textiles, such as dyed linen and silk. The artists combine the use of industrial production techniques with manual processes, creating objects that lie somewhere between the organic and the inanimate, the natural and the man-made, the one-off and the mass-produced.

Venturing into the wider world

The beginnings of their collaborative creative work date back to the time when they were both active in the post-graffiti scene – it was there that they began exploring the avant-garde aesthetic they spoke of in an interview with Swarm Mag:

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Our [graffiti] works, inspired by dark music, were filled with unusual ornaments and a free interpretation of counter-cultural symbolism. At one point, we thought that our visual language could break free from flat surfaces and begin to exist in a multidimensional form as spatial installations.

Speaking to the Kultura Poznań website in 2021, Knychaus said of his experiences collaborating with Lucińska:

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We draw extensively […] on our diverse backgrounds, yet we share similar thematic interests. We’ve also been a couple in our private lives since the very beginning of our practice. Living together, sharing a workspace, and exchanging views and insights have meant that every project has, in some way, been a joint endeavour for us.

Lucińska added:

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We came […] to the conclusion that working as a duo is the most natural outcome of our creative process. In any case, the need for collective action has probably been with us from the very beginning. Many of our early projects involved bringing in other artists or creators from various fields.

'And the door was kicked open again'

One of the duo’s first major solo exhibitions was And the door was kicked open again at the FUTURA Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague (2021). The starting point for the project was the history of the development and gradual decline of certain industries in Central and Eastern Europe during the period of political transition, interpreted by curator Caroline Krzysztoń as a narrative about the transformation of economic systems, ownership and mechanisms of colonisation.

Within the gallery space, Inside Job created an elaborate installation inspired by industrial architecture, in which metal structures co-existed with organic forms evoking processes of regeneration, adaptation and resistance. The recurring theme in their work – the interplay between natural and technological orders – served here as a reflection on history understood not as a linear process, but as a cycle of constant repetitions, transformations and shifts.

A key element of the exhibition was their Passages series, comprising steel structures complemented by textile curtains. Positioned on either side of the gallery, these installations formed a sort of passageway or corridor that channelled visitors’ movement through the exhibition space. The motif of the passageway functioned here in both a symbolic and a physical sense. The industrial, repetitive ‘arms’ were juxtaposed with soft fabrics that reacted to air movement and the presence of visitors.

It was also during this exhibition that the thistle motif first appeared; in the years that followed, it became one of the most important elements of the duo’s iconography. In the artists’ view, this plant, capable of growing in degraded and post-industrial areas, came to symbolise resilience, adaptation and forms of life that thrive in adverse conditions. Its distinctive shape appears, amongst other works, in the series of steel reliefs Thistle Mirrors and in the later Will Spread works, where the silhouettes of thistles have been cut out of mirrored metal surfaces.

'There are flowers that are born of mud'

Their first major solo exhibition in Poland was There are flowers that are born of mud (2023). At the 66P gallery in Wrocław, housed in the building of a former garrison bakery, they created a vision whose atmosphere is captured by the exhibition’s description:

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The industrial ovens that used to bake bread for the army have long since gone cold. In any case, no fire could burn in an environment where there is almost no oxygen. The thick dust swirling all around seeps into the body. Between the three cast-iron columns, new life has blossomed. Vines wind their way upwards and cascade down to the ground. Arising from inanimate matter, they live by absorbing the muddy, sludgy liquid. They undergo constant morphogenesis, pausing only briefly in their assumed form. Their presence is intoxicating, so it is hard to tell whether this is merely the old world after its collapse, or the dawn of a new one unfolding beyond the dominions of the species we know.

Visitors could see the botanical-engineering installations that Inside Job had brought into the gallery space, drawing inspiration from, amongst other things, the pages of the 15th-century Wojnicz Manuscript (an illustrated codex, hand-written in an undeciphered script referred to as 'Voynichese'). In their installations, the artists combined organic materials with elements produced by humans or using industrial machinery, subjecting them to further transformations – painting, sanding, bending and waxing. The resulting installations demonstrated that what was once intended to be a vision of the future now appears as an image of a post-natural and post-human order.

'Possibility we are poisoned'

Their interest in processes of transformation and forms of life that emerge in times of crisis was reflected in the duo’s later works. In the three-channel video installation Possibility we are poisoned, presented at the 34th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts (2021), the artists explored the motif of dormant seeds capable of surviving in adverse environmental conditions. Drawing inspiration from the poetry of writers such as Diane di Prima, Hélène Cixous and Sylvia Plath, they created a narrative about a future in which new forms of life gradually transform existing habitats and systems of interdependence. The installation expanded upon the reflection, present in their work, on adaptation, regeneration and the potential of organisms functioning on the fringes of known biological orders.

In the years that followed, these themes resurfaced in the large-scale installation Paradise Rot, presented, amongst others, at the exhibitions Świątynia Baśni (The Temple of Tales) at the BWA Wrocław Główny gallery (2024) and Kukania (Peekings) at the Arsenał Elektrownia Gallery in Białystok (2025). The project developed Inside Job’s distinctive vision of a world in which natural and technological processes remain in a constant interplay, and the boundaries between the organic and the artificial are gradually blurred.

Monumental steel structures, textile forms and organic motifs created an immersive environment that drew on both folk beliefs and mythology, as well as contemporary concepts of posthumanism and so-called ‘dark ecology’.

However, the recurring motif of vegetation in the duo’s work does not function as a symbol of a return to nature, but rather as an image of the ceaseless transformation of matter and life’s capacity to adapt in conditions of environmental, social and economic instability. In this sense, Paradise Rot develops one of the most important themes of Inside Job’s practice: the search for new forms of coexistence in a world in a state of permanent transformation.

‘Inside Job’ – Works by the Collective [Image Gallery]

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Exhibitions & awards

Inside Job present their work at solo and group exhibitions. To date, their works have been on display at venues including the Zachęta in Warsaw, the Arsenał Gallery in Białystok, the BWA Gallery in Wrocław, at 66P in Wrocław and at the Pawilon and SKALA galleries in Poznań, as well as abroad, as part of a solo exhibition at the 34th ‘Iskra Delta’ Graphic Arts Biennale in Ljubljana, in Italy (eastcontemporary, Milan), in the Czech Republic (FUTURA and MeetFactory, Prague), Denmark (Cantina Gallery, Aarhus), Greece (Hot Wheels Projects and the Athens Digital Arts Festival, Athens), in Germany (Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, BSMNT Gallery), in Switzerland (Aresenic, Centre for Performing Arts in Lausanne) and in South Korea (Caption Gallery, Seoul). Inside Job is also contributing to a group exhibition at the Polish Pavilion at the 16th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea in autumn of 2026.

The duo’s works have also won numerous awards. Inside Job were winners of the second Hana Future Art Award at the Art Busan fair in South Korea (2026) and recipients of the Młoda Polska grant (2026); they were also nominated for the international Allegro Prize (2020). They received the Poznań Art Scholarship (2023), the City of Poznań Award for Young Artists (2020), the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage Award (2018) and the Santander Universidades Award (2016). In 2018, they were finalists in the international Artagon IV competition in Paris.

They have taken part in artist residencies, including at Mazi Projects, run by the Razem Pamoja Foundation in Athens, Greece; the House of Arts in Brno, the Czech Republic; Aldea Residency, Bergen, Norway; RUPERT Residency, Vilnius, Lithuania; A-I-R FUTURA, Prague, Czech Republic; Residency Gurzelen, Biel/Bienne, Switzerland; TestDrive, Nicosia, Cyprus; and Kulturfabrik, Burgdorf, Switzerland.

interdisciplinary art