ANNA ZARADNY | Enjoy the Silence
vernissage:
📅 24.01.2026
⏰ 18:00
📅 24.01–7.03.2026
📍 Galeria Foksal
ul. Foksal 1/4
Warsaw
"Enjoy the Silence" is a soundless video work of a contemplative nature, arranged as a series of sequences showing splashes of matter that begin to form shimmering constellations. Focusing attention on a single detail and the hyperrealistic way of recording the moment of surface disintegration reveal clear inspirations from structural film. Through suggestive use of motion and light, a plastic material was created that can be considered in choreographic terms. The film transports the viewer into a sphere that equally resembles outer space and an oceanic abyss, offering a chance to immerse oneself in silence. However, this soothing mood is illusory, because the cracking matter creates intense imagined auditory impressions that can increase the feeling of anxiety.
The dominant video work "Enjoy the Silence" on the exhibition is accompanied by spatial installations that extend the film’s field beyond the projection medium. The artist materializes a chosen frame, multiplying it in the gallery space and giving it the status of an object. The image is halted, taking the form of a soundless score. A shard of glass observed through a peephole in the wall functions as a focus of attention, triggering a relationship between seeing and imagined sound. Another object, repeating the shape of the score and placed in a snowy landscape outside the gallery window, transfers the experience beyond the interior of the exhibition, intertwining the exhibition order with external reality.
The central issue of the installation is the illusory nature of sensory perception. Images of shattered glass and the lack of a fixed subconscious sound put the viewer into a state of cognitive dissonance. Boundaries between materiality and ephemeral experience blur. The image seduces with its aesthetic precision and at the same time destabilizes a clear identification of matter, evoking associations with ice, water, or cosmic dust. The expectation of sound, the tension between contemplation and the instinctive defensive reaction to “exploding” matter, trigger somatic responses and affect the viewer’s nervous system. Slowed movement softens the sharpness of disintegration, offering an experience of relaxation while also taming fear — of darkness, fragility, and sudden disturbance of calm. It invites you — savor the silence.
Anna Zaradny’s work also resonates with ecological and climatic contexts. A shard of glass evokes the fragment of a calving glacier — an ephemeral, fragile sign of a process of disintegration happening before our eyes. The silence in "Enjoy the Silence" contrasts with the problem of sonic pollution of the environment, one of the invisible plagues of civilizational acceleration. In this sense, the exhibition becomes a space of attentiveness and quiet, but also of critical reflection.
An important reference point for the exhibition is the concept of deep listening and the tradition of musical and film avant-garde, including the work of John Cage. Silence does not function here as absence but as a strategy to intensify perception — activating the listening to what is potential, imagined and not directly recordable. "Enjoy the Silence" proposes a borderline experience: suspended between sound and its absence, wonder and anxiety, matter and the process of its disintegration. It is an invitation to mindfully remain in tension that reveals the deceptiveness of our senses and the fragility of the world we perceive.
Work: Anna Zaradny "Enjoy the Silence", 2018, video 13'08", collection of Fundacja Sztuki Polskiej ING
In 2026 Galeria Foksal celebrates the 60th anniversary of its activity. On this occasion, a year-long program of exhibitions and artistic activities is being carried out, constituting a space for creative dialogue between the institution’s history, present and future. Anna Zaradny’s exhibition is part of the gallery’s anniversary program.
BIO:
Anna Zaradny (b. 1977) — sound and visual artist, composer, instrumentalist, co-founder of the Musica Genera festival and publishing house. She realizes her work in the field of sound and visual arts. She is a classically trained graduate of the Academy of Music, where she studied saxophone and conducting. She uses experience in improvised and experimental music, treating instruments and other tools as open, organic forms. As a composer and instrumentalist she moves across a wide spectrum — from acoustic improvised music with a minimalist contemporary idiom to structurally and compositionally complex, entirely electronic experimental forms. Zaradny creates photography and video through scores, performances, objects, compositions and sound installations. She employs abstraction, micro-sounds and architectural objects, light and space, creating acoustic environments that allow viewers to become part of the work and touch architecture on the level of sound, exploring non-verbal modes of expression through narrative or ideas. In this way she questions the supremacy of the image, allowing sound to serve as an important narrative signal that can be experienced bodily. In modified environments, with considered lighting and sound design that stimulate instinctive experience of the presented architecture across a broad range of immersive spaces, she seeks links between the human body, sound, space and technology, exploring cracks in sound and image, and creating moments of sensory penetration and the illusory nature of their perception. These works are characterized by ambiguity of concepts and the relationship between ideas and the medium of form.
