We invite you to visit Home, an exhibition by Irmina Murawska, presented as a result of the Audience Award at the 23rd SURVIVAL Art Review. In her exhibition at Mieszkanie Geppertów Gallery, Murawska confronts the archetype of home, also through the prism of her personal experiences.
The exhibition Home by Irmina Murawska will be on view at Mieszkanie Geppertów from 10 April to 8 May 2026. Admission is free. The gallery is open every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm. It is located at 1/2 Ofiar Oświęcimskich Street, with the entrance accessible from the courtyard.
The Archetype of Home in Culture
Cultural texts created during the Romantic era elevated the home—the seat of the family—to the rank of one of the most important topoi. The home ceased to be merely a shelter from the elements and became a symbol of closeness, safety, care, and the cultivation of family traditions.
In this nineteenth-century idyll, the home is the place where we are born, work, and die—according to the old saying, “from cradle to grave”—constantly surrounded by a supportive and devoted family. This idealized vision of home, also understood as the smallest social unit, remains present in both individual and global narratives. The home is protected in storytelling, and its potential collapse appears as a universal catastrophe. The home is sacred.
Close up on Irmina Murawska’s installation “Refuge in a World of Lost Time” presented on 23. SURVIVAL Art Review, photo by Małgorzata Kujda
Irmina Murawska’s Artistic Strategy
Irmina Murawska confronts the archetype of home through the lens of personal experience. She constructs her vision of home based on its widely shared cultural and identity-related image, employing creative techniques associated with sharing and care. For this reason, her home remains cozy and inviting. Yet beneath the surface of soft, safe materials and decorative objects lie traumas, painful moments, and longings for a sense of domestic security that, after all, must exist somewhere.
Murawska is a graduate of the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. She currently lives and works in Łódź, focusing primarily on textile-based works. Her recent practice centers on lived experience, emotions, and relationships. By reaching into memory and touching her most sensitive inner points, she reconstructs her own experiences. The exhibition forms part of the Audience Award of the 23rd SURVIVAL Art Review.
Close up on Irmina Murawska’s installation “Refuge in a World of Lost Time” presented on 23. SURVIVAL Art Review, photo by Małgorzata Kujda
Audience Award for Irmina Murawska
The exhibition at Mieszkanie Geppertów Gallery follows Irmina Murawska’s receipt of the Audience Award at the 23rd SURVIVAL Art Review for her work Refuge in a World of Lost Time. For the past five years, in addition to a financial prize, the Art Transparent Foundation has enabled the winner of the Audience Award to realize a solo exhibition at Mieszkanie Geppertów. Previous recipients who presented solo exhibitions as part of the SURVIVAL Audience Award include Martyna Modzelewska, Paweł Kulczyński, and Janek Kowalski.
Refuge in a World of Lost Time
More than 20,000 visitors to the 23rd SURVIVAL Art Review had the opportunity to experience Murawska’s installation Refuge in a World of Lost Time. The work functions both as an object and as a sensory space of quiet contemplation—a chapel for body and spirit. In an era of disruption to the natural rhythms of human life, we seek places where we can take refuge, rest from the rush of the world, and escape the overload of stimuli.
Drawing on nature, the artist created an installation featuring a sculpture set within a soothing environment. The work has a spiritual and meditative dimension. It invites visitors to step, even briefly, outside the accelerating world and hide in the shadow of a form that seems to come from beyond our reality. The space may encourage reflection, but it can also become a site of temporary transformation—like an insect undergoing metamorphosis while hidden inside a cocoon.
Irmina Murawska’s installation “Refuge in a World of Lost Time” presented on 23. SURVIVAL Art Review, photo by Małgorzata Kujda
