A new exhibition at Warsaw's Art Walk gallery on Europe Square: 'Strangely familiar. Sometimes Active Objects', whose creator is Jan Pieniążek.

In the cosmic capsules that make up the Art Walk Gallery on Plac Europejskie in Warsaw, objects that are undoubtedly 'spiritual' will appear in September. These are things that went out of common use years ago and were seemingly completely forgotten, will return like distorted afterimages of the past. They will recall not only a time that has passed, but also the vague tangles of incoherent emotions associated with it.

A bygone familiarity, somehow strangely charged with anxiety today, now evokes a mixture of nostalgia and embarrassment. After all, it was not so long ago that all these things were signs of novelty for us. Technical devices and decorative gadgets or toys used to arouse - perhaps hidden, but nevertheless - genuine excitement; and now, as relics of modernity, they are similar to the troublesome spectres of our experiences that demand recognition," says Grzegorz Borkowski, co-curator of the exhibition "Strangely familiar. Sometimes Active Objects'.

Jan Pieniążek builds strongly ambiguous constructions. Absurd humour activates some kind of horror, crude concretes exude an almost sacral solemnity, routine celebrity show rubs up against secret knowledge. When asked about the principle behind their selection, he self-deprecatingly admits that they rather chose him, because he wasn't actually looking for them. His practice is not mere recycling, but a form of upcycling - transforming discarded things into objects now endowed with undoubted added value," say the exhibition's curators, Jakub Słomkowski and Grzegorz Borkowski.