Zachęta Project Room

curator: Magda Kardasz
cooperation: Pola Gadowska

‘The regulatory line is a guarantee against arbitrariness.’

Le Corbusier

Agnieszka Mastalerz’s new choreographic video work, Reszta/Remainder, incorporates footage filmed in autumn 2025 at the Weissenhofmuseum in Stuttgart. Housed in the Doppelhaus, a semi-detached house designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, the museum is part of the Weissenhofsiedlung, a modernist housing estate built for the Deutsche Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart in 1927. The estate presented a new approach to addressing the housing shortage following the First World War, as well as proposals for affordable, rational housing for the middle and working classes. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was the exhibition’s artistic director, and alongside Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius was also among many invited architects. Today, these experimental buildings are widely regarded as some of the most significant examples of 20th-century modern architecture. However, their construction sparked both excitement and controversy, with critics pointing to their elitism and disconnect from the era’s social realities. Nevertheless, the project catalysed similar initiatives in other European cities, including the 1929 Wohnung und Werkraum estate in Wrocław, and projects in Brno, Prague, Zurich and Vienna.

Since 2006, the Doppelhaus has housed the Weissenhofmuseum im Haus Le Corbusier, and it has been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2016. Although never inhabited, this model building has become a monument of modernist architecture, primarily visited by admirers of the legacy of its leading creator and ideologue. Its unadorned geometric form, constructed from standardised elements with a white façade, open floor plan, flat roof, ribbon windows, characteristic pilotis and integrated furniture, embodies the principles of Le Corbusier’s modern architecture.

‘The project focuses on the human body moving and functioning within strictly defined structures — it refers to the utopian visions of modernism that shaped living spaces based on mathematical and exclusionary assumptions’, the artist explains.

In the darkened gallery of Zachęta Project Room, a three-channel video installation is presented which, according to Mastalerz, explores the relationship between the human body and modernist architecture through movement, perception, and interpretation. An essential feature here was the Modulor — a system of proportions developed by Le Corbusier and published in 1951 as a tool for harmonious interior and furniture design. This mode of thinking is already evident in the much earlier Doppelhaus.

Agnieszka Mastalerz’s video work consists of three chapters, each examining a different aspect of the relationship between the body and particular architectural forms. The first chapter documents the interiors of the Doppelhaus and was filmed using a camera mounted on a tripod and rotated slowly to capture the perspective of a 183 cm tall man. As the artist notes, this part of the work refers directly to the proportional assumptions embedded in the Modulor, as well as to Le Corbusier’s assertion that space is experienced, among other things, through the turning of the head. The video reveals both the interior and the view through the window. The use of a wide-angle lens distorts the lines, stripping the architecture of its ideal form.

The second part of the video installation consists of dynamic, handheld footage of an improvised performance by students from the Stuttgart State Academy of Fine Arts (Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart). The action unfolds in the living room, kitchen, bathroom and on the Doppelhaus’s terrace. The performers explore the rooms through movement and touch. Their energy seems to ‘stretch’ the interior. The spontaneous performance gains momentum, reaching a frenetic, trance-like peak on the terrace. This creates an organic contrast with the clearly defined, modernist structures.

The third part of the installation is a filmed record of the movements of a young woman — professional choreographer and performer Rachel Gill — in the maid’s room (Dienstmädchenzimmer), which is located on the ground floor. The performer explores this low-ceilinged space, which is dominated by grey tones. Her posture and movements emphasise the claustrophobic tightness of the room, as well as the narrow corridors and staircases of the villa through which she moves. At the Zachęta Project Room exhibition, this video is presented in a longitudinal space measuring just 60 cm in width, mirroring the actual width of the Doppelhaus corridors. According to Agnieszka Mastalerz, the maid’s room represents hierarchy and the invisible labour that sustained the ideals of the modernist home, while the choreography exposes the power structures embedded in architecture. The Dienstmädchenzimmer and the service areas constitute the ‘remainder’ of the building — spaces outside the official, representative circuit. As the artist explains the exhibition title: ‘For me, the remainder reflects those for whom the house was never intended.’

In her earlier works, Mastalerz presented the body in relation to restrictive structures. In Reszta/Remainder, she speaks of a spontaneous body in confrontation with rigorous architecture. The contemporary visual woman artist engages in dialogue with the icon and demiurge of modernist architecture, while invited performers subject the utopian ideal to scrutiny as free movement of their bodies collides with its rigid framework. Here, admiration for the beauty of the building is intertwined with a critical view of its actual functionality. The Doppelhaus is a work of art in itself, yet it is difficult to inhabit — beautiful architecture that does not tolerate personal belongings. The artist seems to ask how we view modernist postulates from today’s perspective and with contemporary social sensitivity. What remainder of the former utopia still exists?  

Magda Kardasz