Lustra. Between Illusion and Reality

A Sunday afternoon at the Copernicus Science Centre, Warsaw's science museum on the Vistula. Not an art museum but a hands-on institution: several hundred interactive exhibits, a planetarium, workshops, a high-voltage theatre.

The temporary exhibition Lustra. Między iluzją a rzeczywistością is devoted to the mirror — reflection, symmetry, optics, perception. It was produced by Technorama in Switzerland; for Warsaw something was added that crosses into art: works by the Polish designer and architect Oskar Zięta, known for steel objects inflated with compressed air whose polished surfaces throw the surroundings back distorted.

The mode of access differs from a museum. You walk through a mirror maze rather than standing in front of it; you produce the optical illusion yourself rather than having it explained. The institution frames the exhibition explicitly as a place where science meets art, placing physics, mathematics, and art side by side.

The shift this produces is worth noting. A mirror in an art museum is material or metaphor. Here it is an experimental setup — and the experience that follows differs less from an exhibition visit than one might expect.