Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

curator: Michał Libera
collaboration: Joanna Waśko
sound design: Ralf Meinz
room acoustic: Andrzej Kłosak

The Rise and Fall of Air is the second part of sculptor Katarzyna Krakowiak’s ‘architectural trilogy’, following Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers, which received a special mention at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. It is not however a simple relocation of her intervention in the Polish Pavilion. If the building in Venice was introduced as a structure transferring the sounds, Zachęta appears to be a structure absorbing the sounds. In both cases, she works with whole buildings, which constitute the material of her sculptures and define the scale of her interventions. The latter become an integral element of architecture, remaining present and developing in real time. In Zachęta, Krakowiak's focus is on massive system formed by waste spaces, which in architectural plans are referred to as "voids - technical spaces". The cramped and inaccessible gaps in between the walls, unused elevator shafts and corridors and most of all a separate floor of skylights - they all host her sculpture, unseen and unreachable for the eye but built with sound. In the case of working with inaccessible space, this is a natural choice: nothing but sound reaches the spaces where her sculpture has been crammed in.