All of Us or None

Imran Perretta’s first solo exhibition in Poland, shown from 17 July to 4 October 2026 at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. The British artist, who works across film, sound and poetry, brought together three works on power, surveillance and exclusion, and the show opened with an immersive sound installation.

The Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art on the exhibition:

Imran Perretta is a British artist working across film, sound, performance and poetry. He is one of the most compelling voices in contemporary European art today. His practice stems from the experience of living in a world of inequality and social tensions, accompanied by a need to oppose acts of war and systemic forms of exclusion. In his works, he addresses themes of power, state surveillance and otherness. The artist examines rising Islamophobia and the processes of identity formation among young people with migrant, often Muslim, backgrounds.

Perretta’s first solo exhibition in Poland opens with an immersive sound installation. Here, sound operates directly on the body and emotions, producing tension and regulating affect through techniques drawn from military technologies as well as the film industry. In the next gallery, the two-channel installation the destructors is presented - a work shown concurrently at Tate Britain. The film centres on a group of young men from Muslim backgrounds, navigating social pressure in a world that, in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, has come to perceive them as both a physical and ideological threat. Within a space shaped by sound and precisely choreographed imagery, the characters’ monologues reveal personal and collective experiences of marginalisation, surveillance and alienation. Shot in a former school building now functioning as a youth centre and care facility, the film situates its protagonists within a decaying architecture that becomes central to the narrative. As the work unfolds, tension intensifies while smoke and water slowly enter the building - a metaphor for the gradual erosion of public space and the collapse of civic infrastructure for racialised and working-class communities.

The theme of exclusion returns in the work 15 Days. The video is rooted in the artist’s time spent in northern France with people displaced after the dismantling of the migrant camp near Calais - known as the ‘Jungle’ - in 2016. The camp had provided temporary shelter for thousands of people from Sudan, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Syria, fleeing war, persecution and economic instability. Perretta focuses on the experience of prolonged suspension, placing fragile temporariness at the centre and emphasising the dignity of those living on the margins of Europe’s political reality.

What to expect

Three works, each in its own space. The entrance led through an immersive sound installation, which set the tone for everything that followed. The museum stated plainly that sound there worked on the body and the emotions using techniques borrowed from military technology and the film industry.

The central work was the two-channel video installation the destructors from 2019, shown concurrently at Tate Britain. The third work, 15 Days, grew out of the artist’s time in northern France among people left without shelter after the Calais camp was dismantled in 2016.

The exhibition text, the colophon and the programme remain on the museum’s own page.

Events

For the close of the exhibition the museum prepared three events at Ujazdowski Castle (the event pages exist only in Polish):

• a screening of Imran Perretta’s film “ISH” (UK 2025, 89 min) in the Castle cinema, in the original English version without Polish subtitles; the museum’s newsletter of 29 September announced it as the Polish premiere (screening page, in Polish);
• on 3 October, a guided tour of the exhibition with the curator, Agnieszka Sosnowska (announcement, in Polish);
• on 3 October, the debate “Podejrzani i podatni. Dorastanie, męskość i radykalizacja” (Suspect and Susceptible: Growing Up, Masculinity and Radicalisation) in the CSW Workshop (Pracownia), on how boys learn to be men today, the manosphere, and the experience of boys of Arab or Muslim background growing up in Europe; the museum announced Agnieszka Sosnowska, Dr Michał Gulczyński, Prof. Katarzyna Górak-Sosnowska and Agnieszka Włodarska as speakers, with Dorota Ogrodzka moderating (announcement, in Polish).

After the show

Power, being watched and otherness are also the subject of shows running now at other Warsaw museums:

• Adam Kozicki. War of Everyone Against Everyone - at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw until 10 January 2027; paintings that grew out of internet reality shows in which a group of people lives under cameras around the clock, a format the museum calls a laboratory of power relations.
• Paths of Blacks Enter the White Land (Drogi czarnych wkraczają w biały ląd) - at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw until 10 January 2027; a show on the Polish People’s Republic’s relations with Sub-Saharan Africa and with Blackness, including work by graduates of Polish art academies from Ethiopia, Sudan and Kenya.
• João Maria Gusmão. Following the White Tiger - at Zachęta - National Gallery of Art until 31 October 2026; for anyone drawn to Perretta’s moving images: twelve looped 16 mm film projections in which the Portuguese artist examines how images connect to history and ideology.