KAJET Journal

In the context of the new work Phoenix.Sun, premiering in Berlin at Tanz im August (Tanz im August) next week, dancer and artist/writer Kasia Wolińska (Kasia Wolińska) discusses fire as a force of destruction and regeneration, the entanglement of pain and pleasure in dance, and the precarious conditions of artistic production—what it means to create, perform, and believe in a time of uncertainty.

Full interview on our website.

“Ethereal Robes of Vulnerability,” hosted by Žeimiai Manor House (Aikas Žado Laboratory), brings together six emerging Eastern European artists whose practices explore the shifting life of the image. Moving between photography, video, sculpture, and installation, the exhibition considers images as material and relational surfaces—sites where bodies, technologies, memories, and non-human worlds meet.

Now on our website.

Curated by Eglė Ambrasaitė Eglė Ambrasaitė

With artworks by
Agate Tūna, Agate Tūna
Emilija Povilanskaitė, Emilija
Gedvilė Tamošiūnaitė, Gedvile Tamosiunaite
Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė, Geistė Kinčinaitytė
Inside Job (Ula Lucińska and Michał Knychaus), Ula Lucińska (Inside Job), Michał Knychaus
Mónika Üveges, Mónika Üveges

Ahead of the Berlin premiere of Phoenix.Sun at Tanz im August next week, dancer and artist/writer Kasia Wolińska (Kasia Wolińska) talks to Kajet about fire as a force of destruction and regeneration, the entanglement of pain and pleasure in dance, and the precarious conditions of artistic production. What does it mean to create, perform, and believe when the world is already on fire—and what might still emerge from the ashes? 🌋

For this performance, Kasia is joined by artist Denis Kozerawski, whose film stills are included here, musician Heinali (Oleh Shpudeiko), dramaturg Jette Büchsenschütz (), and producer Zuza Kubiak (Zuza Kubiak).

Read the full interview on our website.

With thanks to Tanz im August, Studio Hrdinů, Fundacja Ciało/Umysł, Polnisches Institut Berlin, Instytut Adama Mickiewicza (IAM) / Adam Mickiewicz Institute.

Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan (Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan) | Black Seas: Romania at the Venice Biennale (La Biennale di Venezia)

The project representing Romania🇷🇴 at the 2026 La Biennale di Venezia unfolds across two venues. The Pavilion in the Giardini presents a polyphonic installation of sound, moving image, and sculptural instruments, approaching the Black Sea as a site of acoustic memory, ecological transformation, and geopolitical tension. In the Palazzo Correr, the project extends beyond the Black Sea, tracing its connections to wider planetary systems of extraction, circulation, and interdependence.

All elements in this installation operate as part of a larger whole. Nothing stands alone. Each component resonates with the others, forming an interdependent system in which image, sound, and matter interact. What unfolds is not a single narrative, but a confluence. A field of relations. A sea that is always more than one.🌊

Read more about the exhibition (blackseas.ro | Romanian Pavilion 2026) on our website kajetjournal.com!

Less concerned with propaganda at its loudest than with the moment it ceases to be heard, Andreea Ilie’s May the Sun Always Shine follows how political imagery slips into everyday routines: a pin fastened to a shirt, an illustration adorning a magazine, a monument inhabiting a field. Once charged with ideological purpose, these symbols become ordinary, almost invisible, woven into the visual texture of daily existence and, through repetition, into collective imagination itself. By reworking these icons of the past, the exhibition reveals how visual culture endures precisely when (and because) it appears most natural.

May the Sun Always Shine by Andreea Ilie is on view between 25 June and 31 August 2026 at MNȚRplusC

Super happy to have contributed to the newest issue of Errant Journal, dedicated to companions, with an essay on the politics of non-Western friendship as seen through the spectre of sound. Thank you and Katia Krupennikova

In the summer of 1972, Tropical Fiesta, a band from the Central African Republic, toured socialist Romania—playing across 20 cities in just 22 days, with televised appearances and a stop inside Electrecord’s recording booth. As the needle settles into the vinyl’s grooves, broken echoes of “Ceaușescu, Bokassa” and “Vive la Coopération Centrafricano-Roumaine” drift in and out of a tropical Afrobeat, the pulsing rhythm of soukous or the dance music of decolonization.

What emerges is less a singular story than a wider field of encounter. Besides Tropical Fiesta, there is a myriad of non-Western collaborations, from the Afro-Cuban jazz of Ghana’s Workers’ Brigade (1966), to the Paraguayan rumba of Los Guaireños (1968), the canción popular of Los Machucambos (1968), and the yéyé of Madagascar’s six-sibling outfit Les Surfs (1967), one of the most prominent pop groups in Malagasy history. All toured socialist Romania at some point in the late 60s, early 70s. Bokassa himself visited the country in 1970, and welcomed Ceausescu two years later.

But if, for Tropical Fiesta’s leader Charlie Perrière, the encounter was “an effective means of struggle against colonialism, a call to action against the exploitation of the African people who long for freedom,” the archival record suggests a more uneven reality, where intent and inscription do not fully align. When a decolonizing African republic and a rapidly industrializing socialist state meet at a charged historical moment, the promise of solidarity is always already entangled with negotiation—of sovereignty, material exchange (and diamonds), and diplomatic interest, as much as of friendship.

Gedvilė Tamošiūnaitė (Gedvile Tamosiunaite) | Screen Works

Galerija Meno Niša (Gallery MENO NIŠA)

11. 6. – 3. 7. 2026

Curated by Eglė Ambrasaitė (Eglė Ambrasaitė)

Working on the fine line between installation and photography, Gedvilė Tamošiūnaitė divines the future using techniques evocative of the past. Her silkscreen prints informed by the look of obsidian remind us not only of this magical stone but also of the screens we so often depend on in our everyday life. As with our devices, we can catch glimpses of ourselves in Gedvilė's work and be confronted with "a healthy terror of being alive."

Read the exhibition text of the curator, Eglė Ambrasaitė, on our website kajetjournal.com!

FROM THE ARCHIVE: Maria Plichta (Maria Plichta)| Lost Futures at the Margin

In 2010, the world’s largest Jesus statue was erected in the town of Świebodzin in western Poland. It is called Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. Take that, Rio Jesus; the Świebodzin iteration of the Lord’s likeness is not merely grander in stature—his reach is cosmic. From his Świebodzin home, he does not simply look down on his earthly flock, but up to the ungraspable cosmos. He also watches over a Tesco. ✝️

Originally appearing in Kajet 05, Maria's text explores themes of national suffering, lost futures that never were, and AI face control to bring an account of a Poland "robbed of a glorious past that might never have existed". 🇵🇱

Read the full article at kajetjournal.com!

1. Visit of John Paul II to the Parliament of the Republic of Poland (June, 1999).
2. Banner of a local Polish military organisation.
3. Christ the King Statue in Świebodzin (2011).
4. "Katyn, a warning to Europe!", anti-Soviet propaganda poster (1943).

FABER | Chemical Bonds

The exhibition "Chemical Bonds" at FABER as part of .signals.faber is ending this Sunday, 21st of June. Catch the last guided tours this weekend!

“Chemical Bonds” transforms invisible processes into accessible installations and narratives, drawing on research into the transformation of Romania’s chemical industry led by Norbert Petrovici together with Mihai Iacob and Zoltán Mihály. Tracing its development from the integrated industrial ecosystem of the 1970s and '80s to the present day, the research reveals an industry that is vulnerable, yet holds significant potential for innovation.

Read more about the exhibition on our website, kajetjournal.com.

Curated by martinamuzi
Director of FABER: Oana Simionescu