Odwrażliwianie

Karolina Grzywnowicz shows her newest work at Zachęta. There is a scent installation about the Polish-Belarusian border in the Białowieża Forest, a video built from camera-trap footage biologists recorded there, and lullabies sung in Palestinian refugee camps. The show runs from 16 October 2026 to 10 January 2027, and Thursdays are free.

A note on the title. Zachęta publishes an English page for every exhibition, but the English page for this one is still empty: no title, no text, not even the artist’s name. We have not invented an English title of our own, so the Polish one stands. “Odwrażliwianie” is a coined noun built on the verb “odwrażliwić”, to take someone’s sensitivity away; it names a process of being made numb, which is what the show is about. The museum has not published an English version of this text, so the translation below is ours.

Zachęta on the exhibition:

In the newest works on show, Karolina Grzywnowicz takes up the political dimension of the senses - she looks at the ways power can act on the body: on our sensory experience of reality, but also on basic physiological processes. She shows how acting on the senses can lead to pain, disorientation, fear, exhaustion and submission. At the same time she uncovers grassroots forms of dissent and looks for new tools of resistance.

The artist focuses on regions of humanitarian crisis: the Polish-Belarusian border and Palestine. Borders between states - especially in the face of today’s conflicts - are places where the mechanisms of necropolitics come clearly into view. These are the systemic tools and practices by which power decides whose life is to be protected and whose may be exposed to death. In that sense migration policy stops being a system of protection and becomes a dehumanising, oppressive system of exclusion. Disinformation, militarised infrastructure and the natural environment of the Białowieża Forest all work to that end, and for refugees that forest can become a trap with no way out.

The videos, objects and installations in the exhibition - including a scent installation - treat the senses as a political field that can be shaped, disrupted and subordinated. The sense of smell matters particularly here, and the new project Odwrażliwianie is built around it. The artist concentrates on the olfactory dimension of the border experience in the Białowieża Forest - as lived by refugees and by the people bringing them help. Grzywnowicz works with scent not only as a trace of presence or a testimony of violence, but above all as a possible tool of healing. Pułapki shows how the natural environment of the Białowieża Forest becomes part of the machinery that enforces the border. The video installation started from research by biologists who used camera traps to document the effect of border infrastructure on local ecosystems, and on animal migration in particular. On the margin of that scientific project a body of evidence emerged - an unplanned, grassroots archive of life and violence at the border.

Combat Breathing (2025) takes up survival under oppression, starting from what tear gas does to the body. Breathing - the most basic of physiological functions - becomes a political act here. Grzywnowicz is interested in the experience of people who have lived under occupation for years and in the ways they try to protect themselves and their communities. In Bedtime (2021) the artist addresses sleep deprivation - the withholding of rest and of quiet sleep - as practised in Palestinian refugee camps. In response to that reality she recorded lullabies sung there to children, songs that take on a particular meaning under permanent siege. They are a form of care, but also a carrier of memory and of cultural continuity. These are the voices of Palestinians whose right to life is being consistently denied.

Grzywnowicz reflects on the weaponisation of the senses, that is, on the use of perception and bodily experience as instruments of control. At the same time she shows how that control over individual and collective feeling can be taken back.

What to expect

The curator is Katarzyna Kołodziej-Podsiadło. Zachęta gives neither a room count nor a number of works. What the exhibition page does say is that the show is made of video works, objects and installations, one of them working through scent.

Four works are named:

• Odwrażliwianie - the new project the whole show is named after. It deals with the smell of the border in the Białowieża Forest, the primeval woodland on Poland’s frontier with Belarus, as refugees and the volunteers helping them experience it. Scent here is at once a trace of presence, evidence of violence and, in the museum’s words, a possible tool of healing.
• Pułapki (the Polish word for traps) - a video installation assembled from camera-trap footage. Biologists set the traps to study what border infrastructure does to animal migration; what they also recorded was what the border does to people.
• Combat Breathing (2025) - on survival under oppression, starting from the effect of tear gas on the body.
• Bedtime (2021) - lullabies recorded in Palestinian refugee camps, made in response to the sleep deprivation practised there.

Two of them, Pułapki and Odwrażliwianie, were produced with the Berlin Biennale and funded by the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation. KROSNO is the main partner of the exhibition; the Nienieodpowiedzialni Foundation and ANG Odpowiedzialne Finanse are partners.

Two practical warnings. One work releases scent into the room, and unlike a screen you cannot walk past a smell, so factor that in if strong smells bother you. And the subject matter is tear gas, sleep deprivation and death at a border. Zachęta puts no age rating on the show, but this is not an afternoon out with a seven-year-old.

Context

Karolina Grzywnowicz, born in 1984, is a visual artist working where art, research and activism meet. She holds a degree in comparative literature, works in installation, sculpture and video, and divides her time between Berlin and Warsaw. Her recurring subject is plants and landscape read as a living archive of politics: what power plants, what it cuts down, and what it leaves standing to hide something.

She is not a newcomer to this building. In 2015 the Zachęta Project Room showed The Weeds, curated by Zbigniew Libera: a piece of meadow transplanted from two villages in the Beskid Niski and Bieszczady mountains whose inhabitants were deported after the Second World War, shown with a map of settlements that no longer exist. In 2024 her work Dark Green appeared in Zachęta’s Potential Histories.

Scent has been her main medium for several years. For Distillates, in which she distilled essential oils from plants used to camouflage sites of violence, she won a special prize at Warsaw Gallery Weekend in 2022. This exhibition is the next step along that line, with the Polish-Belarusian border as its material.

Tickets and time

• Ticket: 30 PLN full price, 20 PLN reduced, 40 PLN family, 15 PLN per person for groups of 10 or more, 2 PLN for ages 7 to 18, 5 PLN for students up to 26, free under 7. There is no separate ticket for this show - Zachęta runs one price list for the whole building, so your ticket covers everything on display.
• Thursdays are free. The museum prints “Thursday - free entry” on this exhibition’s own page, so the free day does cover it. Season tickets, though, are not issued on Thursdays.
• Other tickets on the price list: 35 PLN full and 25 PLN reduced with the right to come back, and a 20 PLN ticket the museum describes as valid “during one exhibition”. Annual passes: 150 PLN full, 100 PLN reduced, 190 PLN family.
• Hours: Tuesday to Sunday 12:00-20:00 (12 PM - 8 PM), ticket office until 19:30 (7:30 PM). Closed Mondays.
• Booking: no timed entry. Buy online or at the desk; everything is on the museum’s Visit page.
• City card: Warsaw Pass holders enter free. So do journalists, museum and gallery staff, and Polish Card holders.
• Getting there: plac Małachowskiego 3, in the very centre, a two-minute walk from the Saxon Garden. Świętokrzyska metro station (lines M1 and M2), Próżna exit, then two minutes along Królewska street. Bus 106 stops at Zachęta, right by the door; trams 4, 15, 18 and 35 stop at Królewska.
• English on site: the museum does not say whether the wall texts for this show will be in English, and its English page for the exhibition is empty. What is documented: Zachęta runs guided tours in English (and in Ukrainian, Turkish, Italian and French, plus Polish Sign Language), including a weekly Saturday ArtWalk in English at 14:15, and takes group bookings in English at 350 PLN plus admission.
• How long: the museum gives no figure. Grzywnowicz’s works need 40 to 60 minutes, though the scent installation and the two video pieces reward sitting still, so budget an hour. For the whole gallery with the other autumn show, allow two and a half hours.

Who it is for: anyone interested in politically engaged art, in the Polish-Belarusian border crisis, or in scent used as an artistic medium, which is still rare in Polish galleries. It is also one of the few places you will see what camera traps set for animals in the Białowieża Forest actually recorded.

Who should skip it: anyone looking for a restful hour in a gallery, anyone bringing a small child, and anyone who does not want art with an explicit political argument. Zachęta does not pretend this show is neutral, and neither will we.

What the press says

The exhibition has not opened yet, so there are no reviews. One preview has appeared beyond the museum’s own page, in Polish:

• SZUM (31.08.2026, editorial team): in its round-up of the most interesting autumn shows, the Warsaw art magazine sums the exhibition up in one line - the artist has reconstructed the smell that accompanies refugees as they cross borders. Worth noting: SZUM prints the title as “Odwrażliwienie”, a different form from the museum’s own, and gives only the opening date - preview

See also

• Alina Szapocznikow / Nairy Baghramian - the second show Zachęta opens on 16 October 2026, running longer, to 31 January 2027. Same ticket, so one visit covers both.
• João Maria Gusmão. Following the White Tiger - twelve looped 16 mm projections, but only until 31 October 2026. If you want all three shows in one go, you have the first two weeks.
• Zachęta - the gallery has no permanent collection, so check what is in the halls before you buy a ticket; the profile has the hours, prices and directions in one place.

Museum profile: Zachęta - National Gallery of Art.