Weronika Zalewska to represent Poland at Malta Biennale 2026 with her project Archive of Hesitations
Adam Mickiewicz Institute is pleased to announce that Weronika Zalewska will be representing Poland at the second edition of the Malta Biennale. Her video installation, Archive of Hesitations, curated by Ada Piekarska, will be presented in the Polish Pavilion from 11 March to 29 May 2026 in Fort St Elmo, Valletta. The project uses the familiar format of the game show as a tool for reflecting on the European experience of transformation. It shows how mass culture has shaped ideas about modernity, perpetuating the dream of “catching up with the West”, often at the expense of local memory and identity.
The Polish Pavilion at the Malta Biennale 2026 is organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Galeria Bielska BWA, in cooperation with the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Valletta and the City of Bielsko-Biała – Polish Capital of Culture 2026. The project is co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.
The Malta Biennale is one of the youngest but fastest-growing international events dedicated to contemporary art. The second edition will be held from 11 March to 29 May 2026, under the motto CLEAN | CLEAR | CUT. The leitmotif refers to the need for a profound transformation of the world – cleansing it of toxic phenomena, restoring clarity of thinking, and opening new paths in the face of political, ecological, and cultural crises. The event’s artistic director is Rosa Martínez, an acclaimed international curator who has spearheaded some of the world’s most important art events, including Venice Biennale or São Paulo Biennale.
A video installation Archive of Hesitations by Weronika Zalewska will be presented in the Polish Pavilion. The artist turns to the familiar format of a game show, transforming it into a device for examining how contemporary societies learn to recognize, evaluate, and structure knowledge. The format associated with light entertainment here reveals its less obvious face – a mechanism that has been shaping mass imagination for years, imposing a belief in unambiguous answers, clear criteria, and instant judgement.
The project emerges from the Polish experience of political transformation of the 1990s and early 2000s, when entering the free market system involved rapid adoption of Western knowledge, competence, and success models. In Weronika Zalewska’s installation, a game show, one of the most popular media formats of those years, becomes a symbol of that modernisation: the aspiration to “catch up with the West”, often at the expense of our own local traditions of memory and intergenerational exchange and with significant erasure and mockery of working-class and non-urban identities. The work shows how easily the “ready-made” future – capitalism, free market, mass culture – was accepted almost without negotiation and without posing questions about its consequences. The project was also inspired by the artist’s memories from the time of growing up – watching TV for long hours with her grandmother, which reversed the traditional directions of passing knowledge.
The exhibition will bring together three orders: the game-show model of knowledge based on grounded in an illusion of objectivity, forms of relational memory – softer, embodied, and difficult to format, and the materiality of the image revealing its own limits. This material dimension will be further developed through a visual feedback loop intervention by artist Mila Nowacka, that will subtly expose the fragility of the medium itself and draw attention to the technical side of knowledge production, usually invisible to the viewer. The third element will be a video on a reverse of the screen, consisting of archives representing affective, grassroot knowledge exchanges, and visual strategies much different from the game show's illusion of clarity and clean-cut. Together, they will form a ghostly space that asks who has the authority to define knowledge, which forms of memory fit within official narratives, what's the state of intergenerational exchange, and how learning unfolds in an era of media as the primary filter of reality.
Therefore, Archive of Hesitations will become a story about modern times and how we have become accustomed to “correct answers”. Zalewska will propose a different view – one in which uncertainty can turn into something creative, and the image becomes a site of negotiation between imposed form and real experience. It is also a story about the spectres of modern transformation – one in which we learn again to look into the cracks and voids to ask questions rather than search for a single correct answer.
Weronika Zalewska is an artist, researcher, and poet. She creates video works at the intersection of documentary and speculative fiction, engaging with themes such as socio-economic transformations and their impact on the production of narratives and relations. Her works have been exhibited, among others, at Zachęta-National Gallery of Art, BWA Wrocław, Galeria Bielska BWA and the Performance Biennial in Vilnius.
Ada Piekarska is a curator and writer on contemporary art. She currently heads the programming team at Galeria Bielska BWA in Bielsko-Biała, Poland. Her curatorial practice focuses on the non-artistic functions of contemporary art, particularly its entanglements with structures of power and its capacity to reshape social imaginaries. She is the curator of the Bielska Jesień Painting Biennale – one of the most important art competitions in Poland.
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The Adam Mickiewicz Institute (IAM) brings Polish culture to people around the world. Being a state institution, it creates lasting interest in Polish culture and art through strengthening the presence of Polish artists on the global stage. It initiates innovative projects, supports international cooperation and cultural exchanges. It promotes the work of both established and promising artists, showing the diversity and richness of our culture. The Adam Mickiewicz Institute is also responsible for the Culture.pl website, a comprehensive source of knowledge about Polish culture. More information: https://iam.pl/en.
