New exhibitions in MOCAK

New exhibitions in MOCAK

On Friday, 24 October, at 6 pm, Adam Budak, Director of MOCAK The Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków, together with his team and event partners: Robert Piaskowski (Director of the National Centre for Culture) and Krzysztof Pietraszewski (Artistic Director of Sacrum Profanum) invite you to the opening of the exhibitions:

 

• House of Day, House of Night: Works from the Collection of Radosław Kotarski
• Filip Rybkowski: A Theory of Clouds
• Konrad Smoleński: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More
• Sana Shahmuradova Tanska: The Rapture
• Aleksander Janicki: Poles – Their Own Portraits 2022–2025

 

During the opening, there will be a live performance of Katarina Gryvul’s opera Neslukhane. The 15-minute piece will be performed by the composer.

 

Neslukhane is an exploration of the process of silencing languages, cultures and communities. Drawing on the traditions of the Lemkos – an ethnic group almost completely erased from the maps of Ukraine, Poland and Slovakia – the artist has created a work consisting of motifs from Lemko songs and deconstructed words. The composition is an attempt to present music as a surreal entity of sound that confronts us with the question: How can we create a future together with those who are not fully present here, yet who have not become completely absent? The sound material of Gryvul’s opera dialogues with the images by Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, inviting us into the world of myth, while at the same time evoking what transcends the visual.

 

The opera was composed for a multi-channel system, enveloping the audience in a field of sound. Each speaker carries an individual line of sound, transforming the space into a living topography of movement, echoes and immersion in music. At the centre of the opera is the artist’s voice – processed live – which is fragmented, diffused and re-integrated into spectral forms. The compositional foundation of the work is based on the simplest musical gesture – the use of the singular cadence of chord progression that recurs in Lemko melodies. Gryvul employs layering techniques and canonical structures not to build harmony, but rather to create enduring tension – an acoustic landscape shaped as much by absence as by presence.

 

Texts taken from Lemko dialects have been rendered almost illegible. Subjected to manipulation, spectral filtering and spatial diffusion, they transform into shadows of sound – fragments and whispers that resist reconstruction. Gryvul’s voice flickers between song and breath, articulation and haze, creating a sonic archaeology of exile. Here, language is not a vehicle of semantic clarity, but an embodied trace – the spirit of a people and a place. The Unheard is not an act of mourning loss, but rather a frontier of audibility, where those silenced endure – as a resonance of sound.

 

The opera premiered on 13 July 2025 at the Solvay Centre for Contemporary Art in Kraków, as part of the Gaude Polonia scholarship programme, supported by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, under the artistic supervision of Professor Marek Chołoniewski.

 

Katarina Gryvul – a composer, violinist, producer and music educator from Ukraine. After graduating, she focused on electronic music, combining her classical training with avant-garde sounds. Gryvul’s compositions centre around timbre as the fundamental element of music. In her work, she uses electronics to modulate the sound of live instruments and voice, as well as analogue synthesisers and spatial sound, creating immersive soundscapes. The artist is also the founder of the Gryvul School, an initiative aimed at sharing musical knowledge with audiences around the world. She is a Gaude Polonia scholarship holder – a scholarship from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. She participated in the 37^th General Assembly of the International Confederation of Electroacoustic Music (CIME); she won the Ukrainian President’s scholarship for young artists and composers, and the Grand Prix in the field of music and sound design, Power of Young. She was selected as an artist for the Shape+ 2022/2023 platform.

 

Katarina Gryvul, ph. Michał Maliński