Neither Water Nor Land

From 25 April to 27 September 2026 the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art showed a group exhibition by 14 artists and the duo Centrala that led from the peat bog as an unintended archive to the “bog bodies”, the marsh as a hiding place and today’s “green borders”.

The Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art on the exhibition:

Neither Water Nor Land begins in a place where time does not advance in a straight line. It settles. It thickens. It lingers underfoot. In peatlands, low oxygen and acidic water slow decay to an almost improbable degree - bodies, fabrics, seeds and wooden tools can endure for millennia. What was meant to vanish, instead persists. The bog becomes an unintended archive, holding stories that societies would rather discard and suspending them in a damp, uneasy present.

What are known as ‘bog bodies’, lifted out of the peat, often bear traces of ritual violence. Their composure can deceive: beneath the smooth surface lie wounds, ropes and fractures. At a certain point, the swamp ceases to be landscape and becomes a question about order and the cost of maintaining it. Who was sacrificed? Why that person?

And yet wetlands have also served another purpose. For centuries, they have been refuges - hiding places for deserters, partisans, smugglers and fugitives, for those who had to disappear in order to survive. The hostile terrain could protect as much as it could destroy.

This ambivalence is not confined to the past. It resurfaces along today’s “green borders”, including the Polish-Belarusian frontier, where forest and marsh combine to form lethal corridors along which people are pushed back and forth, stuck in a zone suspended between law and abandonment. The saturated ground slows the body, erases traces and complicates rescue. It acts as a shield and as a weapon.

For centuries, wetlands have been drained in the name of hygiene, progress and security - dismissed as wasteland to be subdued. Today, they are returning within a new extractive logic: as sites earmarked for military investment, and even as places where water cools datacentres - the hidden underlayer of the digital economy. A landscape once deemed useless proves useful again.

Moving between geology, myth and contemporary politics, the exhibition asks what happens when a landscape refuses to dry out or be neatly arranged. In a world fixated on firm borders, the bog suggests another tempo - slower, saturated and persistent. At times, it leaves behind only a faint mineral blue: vivianite, coating bone and waterlogged wood, touching whatever the bog has held.

What to expect

This was a group show rather than a single-name presentation. The museum showed work by Zainab Aldehaimy, Roisin Agnew, Hoda Afshar, Centrala (Małgorzata Kuciewicz and Simone De Iacobis), Alia Farid, Katarzyna Hertz, Breda Lynch, Teresa Margolles, Philipp Modersohn, Vica Pacheco, Stach Szumski, Iza Tarasewicz, Zhang Xu Zhan, Zorka Wollny and Glenda Zapata. The curators were Anna Czaban and Krzysztof Gutfrański.

The exhibition architecture was designed by the studio miasto_pracownia (Barbara Nawrocka, Dominika Wilczyńska). According to the museum’s brochure, it was built almost entirely from reclaimed material: plaster, walls, plasterboard and layers of paint left in the gallery by earlier shows.

The works the museum’s brochure covers in most depth:

• Teresa Margolles, “Línea Fronteriza / Línea de Pantano” (2000-2010/2026) - five large photographs of autopsy sutures, the line continued in wet soil taken from the Polish-Belarusian border zone.
• Zorka Wollny, “Swamps: Human Dreams” (2026) - a sound installation for 60 vintage headphones that sounds like a bog yet contains no field recordings, only human voices from workshops with people living around Białowieża.
• Glenda Zapata, a set of five works (2022-2026) made of bone, hair, teeth and vivianite, among them “Jaw”: teeth collected in Bolivia, each inscribed with one word of a funeral song in the Aymara language.
• Iza Tarasewicz, “The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water” (2026) - a sculpture of dead alder wood and metal, with a second part installed in the park in front of the castle.
• Katarzyna Hertz, “Landscape of Fear” (2023) - a 15-minute film shot in the Białowieża Forest, the old-growth forest on Poland’s border with Belarus, at the start of the humanitarian crisis there in 2021.

The visual signature of the show was vivianite - the mineral blue that coats bone and waterlogged wood lifted out of the peat. The museum used that greenish-blue hue as the exhibition’s running motif, and in Glenda Zapata’s work the mineral appeared literally, as material.

What the press says

In English, Artdaily (25 April 2026, artdaily.com) ran the museum’s own text and nothing more. Two Polish outlets covered the show:

• Label (21 May 2026, MG): a design and culture magazine’s summary of the show’s main threads - the bog as archive and refuge, the Polish-Belarusian border, the draining of wetlands - without a verdict, illustrated with works by Zhang Xu Zhan, Alia Farid and Breda Lynch - label-magazine.com (in Polish)
• Polish Radio, Redakcja Polska (11 June 2026, Ewa Plisiecka): a conversation with the curator Anna Czaban, introduced by a summary of the show’s threads from bog bodies to the new industrial and military uses of wetlands - polskieradio.pl (audio in Polish)

After the show

The museum has not announced another venue for the exhibition, and its bookshop lists no catalogue. What remains is a 29-page brochure describing every work, free to download in English and Polish from the Brochure tab of the exhibition page.

Over five months the show came with a full programme: curator-led tours, a series of tours “from a perspective” (among them one by the poet Julia Fiedorczuk on 10 September) and a five-film season running from Peter Liechti’s “The Sound of Insects” to Roger Corman’s “Swamp Women”. The closing weekend brought a discussion on the politics of wetlands and migration on 24 September, then on 27 September a tour with the curator Anna Czaban and a discussion on so-called useless land.

No critical reviews could be found: Label and Polish Radio described the show without passing judgement. Longer pieces did run in SZUM (28 August 2026) and Polityka (23 September 2026), but both outlets marked them as sponsored or as material supplied by the museum. The museum has published no visitor figures or awards.

Next at Ujazdowski Castle:

• Almost Everything - a retrospective of Aneta Grzeszykowska: photographs from eleven series made between 2006 and 2026, videos and a sculpture; 10 October 2026 to 7 February 2027.
• HAEM by Anna Baumgart and Can Red Be Trusted by Róża Litwa - two solo shows opening 24 October 2026 and running into February 2027.

Related exhibitions elsewhere in Warsaw:

• Everything Will Change - an open-air show by the State Ethnographic Museum in glass pavilions on the Vistula riverfront, about polycrisis and the extraction of resources. One pavilion is devoted to Zakole Wawerskie, a marsh on Warsaw’s east bank, which picks up this show’s thread on drained wetlands; free admission, until 27 October 2026.
• Odwrażliwianie - Karolina Grzywnowicz at Zachęta - National Gallery of Art on the border in the Białowieża Forest, the same border that the works of Katarzyna Hertz, Zorka Wollny and Teresa Margolles addressed; 16 October 2026 to 10 January 2027.

Museum profile: Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art.