Brilliant Weronika Zalewska (DAI student 2022 - 2023) will be representing Poland at the second edition of the Malta Biennale. Her video installation, Archive of Hesitations, curated by Ada Piekarska, will be on view in the Polish Pavilion from 11 March to 29 May 2026 in Fort St Elmo, Valletta. Weronika writes us that she took a lot from her DAI experience into this project, especially the theory class with Ana Teixeira Pinto. In Archive of Hesitations, the familiar format of the game show will become a device for examining how contemporary societies learn to recognise, evaluate, and structure knowledge. The project emerges from the Polish transformation of the 1990s and early 2000s, a moment shaped by fantasies of “becoming the West”. New models of knowledge and identity circulated primarily through soft formats of entertainment—game shows, commercials, edu-tainment programmes that promised objectivity and neutral competence. These formats shaped social aspirations, replacing intergenerational memory with a “ready-made” future of the free market, largely accepted without negotiation, though with significant erasure and mockery of working-class and non-urban identities.
The Archive of Hesitations will propose a way of seeing in which uncertainty becomes a tool for thought, and the image becomes a site of negotiation between the formatted and the lived. It will offer a story about the ghosts of the transitional present—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.
Weronika Zalewska
Archive of Hesitations
Polish Pavilion at Malta Biennale 2026
March 11–May 29, 2026
maltabiennale.art
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