EVENT: JEŚLI/TO [IF/THEN] (OCTOBER 3 2025–FEBRUARY 1 2026, WARSAW, POLAND)

JEŚLI/TO [IF/THEN]

October 3, 2025–February 1, 2026

Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

Curated by Sara Szostak and Marta Grytczuk

2 Jazdów Street Warsaw 00-467 Poland

Hours: Tuesday–Wednesday and Friday–Sunday 11am–7pm
Thursday 11am–8pm

JEŚLI/TO [IF/THEN], on view at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (3 October 2025–1 February 2026), situates storytelling within the conditional logics of code, games, and digital culture. Its title borrows from programming’s most elementary structure—if this, then that—yet the exhibition insists that the same grammar underlies prophecy, folklore, and daily decision-making. Each action unfolds between condition and consequence, whether inside an algorithm or across lived experience.

Curated by Sara Szostak and Marta Grytczuk, the exhibition gathers twenty-three international artists and collectives, among them 2girls1comp, Cassie McQuater, Theo Triantafyllidis, Joshua Citarella, Sara Bezovšek, Léa Porré, and Andrei Chodera-Isakau, to explore narrative not as a vessel for content but as a technology and ideology. The works employ game mechanics, speculative interfaces, interactive fictions, machinic installations, and glitch tactics to expose how stories are generated, disrupted, or overwritten.

Rather than declaring the death of narrative, JEŚLI/TO [IF/THEN] describes its proliferation. Game logics—save states, respawns, grinding, the unstable roles of NPCs and protagonists—are no longer metaphors borrowed from entertainment but templates through which contemporary life is rehearsed and managed. Many of the featured projects treat breakdowns as generative: glitches, stutters, and computational errors become strategies that unsettle authority, open alternative storylines, and highlight the politics of narrative: who gets to speak, who is scripted, who is erased.

The exhibition’s design by Elżbieta Szurpicka and narrative structure by Stanisław Święcicki reinforce these ideas spatially. Moving through the layered galleries of Ujazdowski Castle, visitors encounter a meta-narrative that guides, interrupts, or contradicts their passage, underscoring that every exhibition is also a story authored in part by its audience.

With executive production by Julia Lipiec and visual identity by Alexey Layfurov, JEŚLI/TO [IF/THEN] refuses to offer resolution or escape. Instead, it frames the conditional present as inescapable: a space where causality is programmed, fragile, and endlessly recursive, yet always capable of glitching into something unexpected.

Featured artists:  

• 2girls1comp
• Andrei Chodera-Isakau
• Anna Bidzilia
• Cassie McQuater
• Dorijan Šiško
• Filip Kostic
• Jan Możdżyński
• Janne Schimmel
• Joshua Citarella
• Kévin Bray
• Léa Porré
• Levi van Gelder
• Lucie Gottlieb
• Maciej Krygier
• Sara Bezovšek
• Sebulec
• Sonia Górecka
• Theo Triantafyllidis
• Tomas Sjögren
• Wendi Yan
• Wojtek Didkowski
• Yi Xie
• Yuliia Frolova