BELFAST.- Owned by the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, Collection II is one of Poland’s essential contemporary art assemblages, representative for the Polish art scene of the past thirty years as well as for Eastern Europe. The Collection II concept has been developed to an open corpus concept—a solid foundation for our efforts to build multifaceted narratives in an attempt at describing the reality we live in.

While not our direct experience, the war in Ukraine, frozen protests in Belarus, crowds filling the streets of Tbilisi are phenomena we can certainly identify with. Our existence has been imprinted with a sense of threat—multiple threats, actually—a sense of helplessness, and awareness of a certain time coming to an end, of the gradual decline of an order we recognised as formative.

The exhibition title references Radical Hope, a book by Jonathan Lear. In his foreword to the Polish edition, Piotr Nowak claims the book to be responding to three fundamental questions:

“(1) How does one live in a world which has suddenly lost all sense? (2) is hope at all conceivable in such a world?; if yes, (3) which language should be used to express it?” This approach to hope extends beyond regular expectations of improving a given situation or resolving specific issues; it is an idea of profound transformation. Following Lear’s intuition: in order to exit existential impasse, we need a guide capable of noticing new meanings, new capacities within. Can such role be entrusted to art? Can artists anticipate as yet inexistent solutions through their commentaries on reality?

Artists: Hubert Czerepok, Zhanna Kadyrova, Diana Lelonek, Lada Nakonechna, Marina Naprushkina, Konrad Smoleński, Piotr Uklański.

Curator: Monika Szewczyk / Co-operation: Peter Richards / Co-ordination: Sarah McAvera, Mary Stevens, Eliza Urwanowicz-Rojecka.

Organisers: Adam Mickiewicz Institute / Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast / Arsenal Gallery in Białystok.

The event is part of the UK/Poland Season 2025 organized by the British Council, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Institute of Polish Culture in London, funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Poland.