Jura Shust

From 17 July to 27 September 2026, Zachęta - National Gallery of Art in Warsaw filled five rooms with the first solo exhibition in Poland by Belarusian artist Jura Shust. It was a multichannel installation - films, sound, performance and objects - about how technology is taking over the role that forests, rituals and spirituality once played in our relationship with nature.

Zachęta on the exhibition:

Resin* Solar Plexus is the first solo exhibition in Poland by Belarusian artist Jura Shust.

It tells a story about the relationship between human spirituality and technology. For the exhibition, the artist prepared a new, multichannel installation consisting of films, sound, performative actions, and objects made from organic and industrial materials, arranged in five rooms at Zachęta. It introduces the viewer to a landscape stretching between a Christmas tree plantation, a cemetery where trees grow from graves, and an ancient Eastern European wilderness. These are places where old ideas about human-nature relationships meet contemporary technologies - from industrial exploitation of the environment to artificial intelligence and digital communication networks.

In this landscape, spruces were once seen as links between the material and spiritual worlds, and the forest functioned as a sacred space. Today, these same areas become a site of geopolitical tensions, surveillance infrastructure, and intensive use of advanced technologies. The artist examines how these technologies take over functions previously attributed to rituals, mythologies, and spiritual practices, and how they change our ways of communicating with the environment and understanding reality.

Jura Shust - a Belarusian artist (born 1983) living in Berlin, who combines politically engaged art with the creation of speculative visions of the future. He is interested in the relationships between spirituality, technology, and biopolitics, as well as the possibilities of resistance against systems of power. His works have been presented in numerous institutions worldwide, including Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst GFZK in Leipzig, Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv, Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, and Management in New York. He participated in the 14th Baltic Triennial at CAC in Vilnius, the 4th Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara, and the 15th Gwangju Biennale. In Poland, the artist’s work has so far been presented in a group exhibition at Galeria Arsenał in Białystok, and his film Pine Cone Seeds (2022) was acquired in 2025 for the collection of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. He runs the portal saliva.live, focused on researching the relationship between technology and nature.

Special thanks for supporting the exhibition to: Management, New York; Michael Reznik; Robert Triefus

What to expect

Shust’s new installation filled five rooms at Zachęta and combined films, sound, performative actions, and objects made from organic and industrial materials. It led you through a landscape stretched between a Christmas tree plantation, a cemetery where trees grow from graves, and an ancient Eastern European forest. The curator was Michalina Sablik.

The starting point was the spruce, once seen as a link between the material and spiritual worlds, with the forest treated as sacred space. Shust showed how those same places now become sites of geopolitical tension, surveillance infrastructure, and advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, and how these take over functions that once belonged to ritual and myth. Shust (born 1983) lives in Berlin; his film Pine Cone Seeds (2022) entered the collection of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź in 2025. The artist’s home ground, which he keeps returning to, is the borderland where Poland, Belarus and Lithuania meet, with its old-growth forest.

There was no set route through the rooms. As the curator’s introduction explains, the show told its story on two tracks. Wall texts summarised old folk beliefs about the forest, individual tree species and rites of passage, gathered from local researchers in ethnobotany and folk religion. The labels for the works then showed how Shust turns those beliefs into a story about migration, borders, the ecological crisis and artificial intelligence.

Zachęta’s exhibition page lists 28 related events, from the curator’s tour on 19 July to a herbal-incense workshop on the closing day. They included four guided tours in Belarusian and a talk by the Belarusian ethnographer Masha Maroz on the beliefs of Polesia, where old animist rituals were folded into the Orthodox church calendar. The event archive, the audio description of the show and the curator’s introduction (recorded in both Polish and English) remain on Zachęta’s English exhibition page, where the show appears under the title Żywica* Solar Plexus.

After the show

As of 28 September 2026 Zachęta had not announced a next venue for the exhibition. There is no catalogue on the exhibition page or in Zachęta’s online shop.

No reviews could be found; the show was covered in previews and reports. The Belarusian news site REFORM.news (8 July 2026) presented it as a story about the Białowieża Forest, at once a sacred place and a site of surveillance. Art Viewer (6 September 2026) published installation views, and the Polish portal WP Kultura (Bartosz Sąder, 25 September 2026, in Polish) flagged its final week. Zachęta has published no attendance figure and announced no awards.

On now at Zachęta:

• João Maria Gusmão. Following the White Tiger - twelve looped 16 mm film projections in the same building, until 31 October 2026.
• Home on Roots - Vilnius landscapes by Ana Vostruchovaitė and bark boats by Łukasz Radziszewski from Podlasie, the same borderland Shust comes from; at Zachęta’s project space (Miejsce Projektów Zachęty) until 11 October 2026.

Coming soon at Zachęta:

• Odwrażliwianie - Karolina Grzywnowicz also turns to the Białowieża Forest, with a scent installation about the border and video from biologists’ camera traps; from 16 October 2026.
• Alina Szapocznikow / Nairy Baghramian - marking the sculptor’s 100th birthday, from 16 October 2026.

On a related theme elsewhere:

• Everything Will Change - an open-air show by the State Ethnographic Museum about extracting natural resources and the damage it leaves behind, on aleja Pattona, free, until 27 October 2026.

Museum profile: Zachęta.