VALLETTA.- Adam Mickiewicz Institute announced that Weronika Zalewska will be representing Poland at the second edition of Malta Biennale. Her video installation, Archive of Hesitations, curated by Ada Piekarska, will be on view in the Polish Pavilion from 11 March to 29 May 2026 in Fort St Elmo, Valletta.
In Archive of Hesitations, the familiar format of the game show will become a device for examining how contemporary societies learn to recognize, evaluate, and structure knowledge. The project emerges from the Polish transformation of the 1990s and early 2000s, a moment shaped by fantasies of “becoming the West”. New models of knowledge and identity circulated primarily through soft formats of entertainment—game shows, commercials, edu-tainment programmes that promised objectivity and neutral competence. These formats shaped social aspirations, replacing intergenerational memory with a “ready-made” future of the free market, largely accepted without negotiation, though with significant erasure and mockery of working-class and non-urban identities.
The Archive of Hesitations returns to this moment: to the tension between breaking with the post socialist past and the uncritical embrace of new rules, in which both knowledge and identity were expected to be instant, measurable, and unambiguous.
The exhibition will bring together three orders: the game-show model of knowledge grounded in an illusion of objectivity, forms of relational memory, and the materiality of the image revealing its own limits. This material dimension will be further developed through a visual feedback loop intervention by artist Mila Nowacka, that will subtly expose the fragility of the medium itself. The third element is a video on a reverse of the screen, consisting of archives representing affective, grassroot knowledge exchanges, and visual strategies much different from the game show's illusion of clarity and clean-cut. Together, they will form a ghostly space that asks who has the authority to define knowledge, which forms of memory fit within official narratives, what's the state of intergenerational exchange, and how learning unfolds in an era of media as the primary filter of reality.
The Archive of Hesitations will propose a way of seeing in which uncertainty becomes a tool for thought, and the image becomes a site of negotiation between the formatted and the lived. It will offer a story about the ghosts of the transitional present—one in which we learn again to look into the cracks and voids to ask questions rather than search for a single correct answer.
Weronika Zalewska is an artist, researcher, and poet. She creates video works at the intersection of documentary and speculative fiction, engaging with themes such as socio-economic transformations and their impact on the production of narratives and relations. Her works have been exhibited, among others, at Zachęta-National Gallery of Art, BWA Wrocław, Galeria Bielska BWA and the Performance Biennial in Vilnius.
Ada Piekarska is a curator and writer on contemporary art. She currently heads the programming team at Galeria Bielska BWA in Bielsko-Biała, Poland. Her curatorial practice focuses on the non-artistic functions of contemporary art, particularly its entanglements with structures of power and its capacity to reshape social imaginaries. She is the curator of the Bielska Jesień Painting Biennale—one of the most important art competitions in Poland.
Polish Pavilion at Malta Biennale 2026 is organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and Galeria Bielska BWA, in cooperation with Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Valletta and City of Bielsko-Biała Polish Capital of Culture 2026. Project is co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.
The second edition of the Malta Biennale will be held from March 11 to May 29, 2026, with acclaimed international curator, Rosa Martínez, at its helm, as artistic director. The theme chosen for the second edition is: Clean | Clear | Cut.
The Adam Mickiewicz Institute brings Polish culture to people around the world. Being a state institution, it creates lasting interest in Polish culture and art through strengthening the presence of Polish artists on the global stage. It initiates innovative projects, supports international cooperation and cultural exchanges. It promotes the work of both established and promising artists, showing the diversity and richness of our culture. The Adam Mickiewicz Institute is also responsible for the Culture.pl website, which is a comprehensive source of knowledge about Polish culture. More information: iam.pl.
