Arman Galstyan Curator: Katarzyna Piskorz 📅 Opening: September 4, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM 📅 Exhibition: September 4 – 12, 2025 He barely opens one eye and already knows he will have to be careful. At times, he feels that getting up on the wrong side of the bed is his speciality. A quick shower. He is not ashamed of his fur. He simply dislikes cleaning the drain. He moves quickly and methodically. No meditative baths. In the kitchen, there is the smell of eggs. At home, one can still be oneself, though even there it is not entirely clear what that means. Panes of glass, curtains, drapes, and the tangle of leaves are screens through which the world can be watched without full participation. They create spaces not yet mapped by the gaze and they offer neutrality. The city is no longer so welcoming. Getting around by public transport is a nightmare, and it swallows all the space. At least that is how he feels. People split into those who bore into him with their eyes and those who looked everywhere else, anywhere but at him. Then comes the classification: exotic, suspicious, a problem. The whole joke is that no one knows what to do with him. He does not know what to do with them either. Stare back? He tried. He does not recommend it. For peace of mind, he takes a taxi. He reaches the studio. Here, everything runs according to rules he knows. He paints not about belonging to a culture but about the constant sense of estrangement he feels in Poland, where his features will not let him blend into the crowd. That is how Wilkołek was born a year ago, a diminutive name for a creature that looks different and inspires dread. It made it easier to face his origins and to work through his relation to Armenian heritage, to a country he has never visited but still carries in his very surname. Mount Ararat, where the biblical Ark is said to have come to rest, is one of those places he knows only from family stories, photographs, stamps and labels. This symbol of Armenia is visible from the capital, Yerevan, yet it is out of reach because it lies on the Turkish side. Holiness behind a fence. Stories tied to Ararat say that everything began there. He and his family began elsewhere, on a train, at a station, in an office, in Poland. Sometimes he thinks about that flood and about how everything that was to survive came out of the wooden belly. Strange creatures as well, unnamed, perhaps imagined. Perhaps also those that were not entirely meant to be there but slipped in. He did too. From Armenian legends, he did not know before it follows that he was not the first to put on a wolf’s skin, and the wolf itself returns in that culture many times. In one story, a young woman, fascinated by the delicacy of a visiting stranger’s body, puts on a wolf’s skin at night and tries to devour him. Wounded by a dagger, she dies, and the milk spurting from her breast is said to have formed the Milky Way. In this universe, there also appear the Aralez, winged canine spirits who lick the wounds of fallen heroes to restore them to life. The titular dew is at times an evil spirit and at times a guardian, a wolf protecting the world from forces of evil, but also a wild being that sows chaos. In one legend, it is wolves who save the world from spirits that could destroy it by devouring them. Once a year, the roles reverse and each demon eats one wolf, which keeps a precarious order. Sometimes he returns home, takes off the wolf’s skin and leaves it on the hanger. Then the full moon no longer worries him. He does not look at the sky. More and more often, he dreams of the West, not the sun but a mythical land in Europe where it is easier to acclimatise and blend in. Yet sometimes, when he cannot sleep, the milk that was meant to be a myth gathers on his palate, and everything feels familiar and in its place.
