HAEM

Anna Baumgart at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art: work from across her career, from early videos and sculptures to new installations commissioned by the Castle, gathered around the female body and blood. On view 24 October 2026 to 28 February 2027, with the opening on Friday 23 October at 19:00. Curated by Michał Jachuła.

Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art on the exhibition:

The exhibition brings together works by Anna Baumgart from different moments in her practice - from early videos and sculptures to the newest installations commissioned by the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Set alongside one another, works from different stages of the artist’s career form a narrative in which recurring themes, images and tensions resonate in entirely new contexts.

The central motif of the exhibition is the female body - ever present in Anna Baumgart’s work as a space where identity, memory and resistance leave their record. In her hands, however, the female body is never purely private; it remains entangled in social, political and environmental relations. Within it, the individual is continually interwoven with the collective.

The haem in the title - the component of haemoglobin responsible for binding oxygen and for the red colour of blood - becomes in Baumgart’s work a figure of flow, of the ceaseless circulation of life. On the one hand, it speaks of the body as a space of constant exchange; on the other, it points to what connects us with other organisms, with history and with the environment. Seen from this perspective, Baumgart’s works on motherhood, sexuality and the right to self-agency sit within contemporary debates on the rights of humans and more-than-human beings. Their exceptional quality, however, stems above all from an artistic consistency and originality thanks to which questions posed in the past remain open and meaningful today.

The exhibition draws on the thought of Luce Irigaray and of Astrida Neimanis, who describe organisms as open systems of interdependence. Affects and memory circulate along with the blood - revealing experience as a relational phenomenon that crosses the boundaries of the single body and forms a network of material and emotional connections.

What to expect

Video, sculpture and installation. The museum promises a cross-section: from the artist’s early films and sculptures to the newest installations made specifically for the Castle. Works from different decades are meant to stand side by side so that old questions come back in new company. Do not expect a chronological career survey.

The spine of the show is the female body as a record of identity, memory and resistance. The title word, haem, is the part of the blood that makes it red, and here it stands for circulation and exchange. The museum names three themes outright: motherhood, sexuality and the right to decide about one’s own body. Michał Jachuła is the curator, with Joanna Saran and Brygida Czartoryska producing; the names come from the exhibition’s colophon.

What the museum does not give: the number of works, a list of titles, the running times of the films or the number of rooms. No catalogue has been announced. The artwork the museum uses for the show is credited to Agata Baumgart, untitled.

For this artist it is a return to a familiar address. From 1999 to 2006 she ran Café Baumgart, an artists’ café at Ujazdowski Castle, at first together with Zbigniew Libera, and in 1999 she had a solo show here.

Context

Anna Baumgart was born in Wrocław in 1966 and graduated in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk in 1994. Her work belongs to Polish critical art and feminist art, a strand of Polish art that since the 1990s has taken on the body and gender head-on. Since 1997 she has made videos about femininity, relationships and the way girls and boys are brought up; in the series “True?” (2001) she digitally inserted herself into scenes from two classic films, the Soviet “The Cranes Are Flying” and Stanisław Bareja’s comedy “Miś”, in place of the actresses.

From 2002 she has also made realistic sculpture: “I Got It From My Mom” (2002) on mothers and daughters, and “Bombowniczka” (2004), a young pregnant woman who refuses the accepted image of a mother. Her work is held by Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Hauser & Wirth and FRAC Poitou-Charentes, and since 2005 she has worked with the Warsaw gallery lokal_30. Agata Baumgart, whose artwork promotes the show, is her daughter.

Two names in the museum’s text may be unfamiliar. Luce Irigaray, born in Belgium in 1930, is a French philosopher and psychoanalyst and one of the key figures of feminist thought, known for “Speculum of the Other Woman” (1974). Astrida Neimanis writes about the body as a system bound up with other organisms and the environment, which is the thread the museum picks up.

Tickets and time

• Exhibition tickets: 30 PLN regular, 20 PLN reduced (also for Large Family Card holders), 45 PLN family for two adults and two children under 18, each further child 5 PLN. Children and students up to 26 pay 5 PLN with a valid student ID; children under 7 and Warsaw Pass holders enter free.
• There is no separate ticket for this show. The museum runs one price list for its exhibitions and names no surcharge for a particular one.
• Thursday is free. The museum states that admission to all exhibitions is free every Thursday, so that includes this one.
• Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday 11:00-19:00 (11 AM - 7 PM), Thursday until 20:00 (8 PM). Closed on Mondays. Last visitors are admitted 30 minutes before closing.
• Closing date: the museum’s Polish page and Polish listing give 28 February 2027, while its English page gives 14 February 2027. If you are planning a visit in the second half of February, check the date on the museum’s site before you go.
• Booking: the museum mentions neither advance booking nor timed entry slots. Tickets are sold online at bilety.u-jazdowski.pl and at the ticket desk in the main hall.
• How long: allow 60-90 minutes, more if you want to watch every film in full. That is our estimate; the museum has published neither a works count nor running times.
• Three shows on one ticket: from 24 October 2026 to 7 February 2027 the Castle runs HAEM, Róża Litwa’s “Can Red Be Trusted” and Aneta Grzeszykowska’s “Almost Everything” at the same time. For all three, set aside two and a half to three hours.
• Visitor card: 100 PLN, valid for a year, good for two free exhibition tickets a day. It suits residents who come back several times, not short-stay visitors.
• Groups of 10 to 25 people are booked by e-mail: with a guide at edukacja@u-jazdowski.pl, without one at info@u-jazdowski.pl.
• The cloakroom is temporarily closed (museum information, as of 28 September 2026). The show runs through the winter, so expect to carry your coat.
• Access: the west entrance is at ground level, ramps lead into the courtyard, and the upper floor is reached by stairs with handrails or a lift. There is an accessible toilet on level +1 and two disabled parking bays in the car park.
• English on site: the museum publishes the full exhibition page in English but does not say whether wall texts are bilingual or whether the films are subtitled. It announces no audio guide and no English-language tours; a group tour in English can be requested through the education address above.
• Getting there: Jazdów 2, on the escarpment beside Łazienki Park. Buses 116, 180 and 195 from the Nowy Świat area and bus 188 straight from Chopin Airport stop at Plac Na Rozdrożu, five minutes’ walk away.

Who it is for: anyone interested in Polish feminist art since the 1990s who wants to see one of its key figures across a whole career rather than in a single piece. Paired with the Grzeszykowska show in the same building, it gives you two very different ways of working with one’s own body in a single afternoon.

Who should skip it: parents with small children. The museum sets no age guidance, but the announced themes - sexuality, motherhood, bodily self-determination, blood - are for teenagers and adults. If you come on the free Thursday, expect a crowd.

Events

• 23.10.2026, 19:00 - opening at Ujazdowski Castle. The museum warns that the opening will be photographed and filmed; it does not state admission terms or whether registration is needed. The museum opens Róża Litwa’s exhibition on the same evening at the same hour.

Beyond the opening, the museum has not yet announced curator-led tours or talks around this exhibition.

What the press says

There are no reviews yet: the show opens on 24 October 2026. So far there is one preview, in Polish:

• Magazyn SZUM (31.08.2026, the editors): the Polish art magazine’s round-up of the most interesting exhibitions of autumn 2026 lists HAEM among the six autumn shows at Ujazdowski Castle and sums it up, close to the museum’s own text, as a show about the female body caught in social, political and environmental relations, with blood as a figure of flow - round-up

See also

• Can Red Be Trusted - Róża Litwa’s show opening the same day in the same building; its title also circles around red.
• Almost Everything - Aneta Grzeszykowska’s retrospective at the Castle until 7 February 2027; the artist’s own body as material, mainly in photography, alongside video and one sculpture.
• VALIE EXPORT. Die Doppelgängerin - at the Museum of Modern Art until 16 March 2027; the Austrian pioneer of feminist body art, the closest reference point in Warsaw.
• Alina Szapocznikow / Nairy Baghramian - at Zachęta from 16 October 2026 to 31 January 2027; more than thirty works by Szapocznikow from 1959-1972, including casts of her own body, in dialogue with Nairy Baghramian.

Museum profile: Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art.