Izabella Gustowska. Home’s Shadows

Sunday 13 September 2026, Leipziger Straße 47. At KVOST, the Kunstverein Ost, Izabella Gustowska's "Home’s Shadows" has been running since 10 September and continues until 28 November, curated by Monika Branicka. The gallery sheet and the website list the exhibition as part of the Featured Section of Berlin Art Week and tie it to the KVOST fellowship and the Claus Michaletz Prize 2026, a prize of ten thousand euros awarded by the Secco Pontanova Stiftung to artists from Eastern Europe. Opening hours are Wednesday to Saturday, 2 to 6 pm.

Thirteen works are listed on the gallery sheet, spread across forty-six years: the oldest from 1980, the most recent from 2026. The floor plan on the sheet numbers them; in the rooms themselves no number hangs anywhere.

Gustowska, born in Poznań in 1948, still works there and taught for many years at the city's art academy; she was at the São Paulo Biennial in 1983 and 1987 and in Venice in 1988. For these works, according to the Kunstverein, she returned to the house in Poznań her family has lived in since 1938.

The rooms are painted in colour, and that is the first decision you notice. One zone is grey-green, the next one round the corner is anthracite. On the grey-green wall hang three slender, tall oval objects, photographs stretched over curved canvas: black-and-white pictures of children at the beach, as if from a family album, two in shallow water, one alone at the waterline. According to the work list these are the three works "Homes shadows" from 2026, two of them 239 by 66 centimetres, one 240 by 80, each carrying the first names of the people shown in its title. Across the wall, running through all three, a pale painted water line joins them into one horizon.

Round the corner it goes dark. There stands an oval antique table in dark veneer on turned legs, and a video is projected down onto the table top, 24½ minutes long according to the work list: window crosses, branches, a face, overlaid archive footage in sepia. This is the video installation that gives the exhibition its title. Beside it a horizontal oval box glows cold blue from within, six children in a row behind an undulating surface — format and motif match "Dinner Party", 2026, 88 by 226 centimetres.

So the oval returns three times: as a table top, as a light box, as the support for the photographic works. And the projection onto the table top gets to the heart of it: the place where a family comes together becomes the screen for images from its own archive. The cables are not hidden; they run visibly down the corner into a wall socket, with trunking following the skirting. The space is a ground-floor shop unit with a tall window front to the street; outside, cars are parked.

The works from the eighties that appear on the sheet — "Beyond Myself", 1985 to 1987, and "Relative Similarities" from 1980 — I cannot identify with confidence in my photographs. Two roughly hewn wooden posts with mounted partial forms would fit the dimensions, but that is not documented, so I do not set it down as an attribution. What my photographs show is the new work of 2026.

Photographs: Florian Jäger, 13 September 2026.