Time as Ontological Hinge 

Moving within the great tradition of the memento mori, Grzeszykowska has no intention of celebrating the macabre or constructing funerary allegories. Her operation is subtler and more radical: she makes of time not a theme to be represented but a condition to be embodied. The title chosen for the exhibition — All of a Sudden — captures the Heideggerian essence of the Augenblick, the instant-gaze in which Dasein encounters its own finitude not as an abstract projection but as a possibility always imminent, always already at work. In Heidegger, being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode) is not a morbid theme but the condition of authenticity par excellence: only the recognition of death as one's ownmost, unconditional and unsurpassable possibility restores to existence its irreducible gravity. Grzeszykowska appears to have internalised this lesson to the point of making it not a theoretical position but a bodily method, a visual, cinematographic and conceptual grammar in close dialogue with Bertrand Bonello's feature film The Beast. 

The video installation Clock is, in this sense, the most explicitly ontological work in the entire exhibition. Spanning twelve hours in duration — a temporality that makes no concessions to the viewer, forcing them to reckon with the irreversible rhythm of time — the artist's body multiplies across the space like a living clock hand, copy after copy, hour after hour. Each chime adds a further presence, until the scene populates itself with a proliferation of selves that is, at one and the same time, a form of abundance and dissolution. Here the memento mori does not operate through traditional symbols — the skull, the hourglass, the severed flower — but through the very structure of the work, which inscribes in flesh the irreversible passage of time. The soundtrack of the chimes transforms the exhibition space into something akin to what Tatarkiewicz, in his magisterial history of aesthetics, would call a total experience: an experience in which perception is never purely visual but engages the viewer's entire sensoriality, drawing them into a condition of suspended attention that is, itself, a form of existential awareness. 

The Mask and the Instability of the Self 

Everything deep loves the mask. 
— Friedrich Nietzsche 

If Clock works on time as structure, the photographic series Daughter — born from the Roman residency of the summer of 2025 and presented here in dialogue with the earlier MAMA (2018) — confronts with equal acuity the problem of identity as necessary fiction and unresolved enigma. Grzeszykowska wears a hyperrealistic mask reproducing her own adolescent features, philologically reconstructed from family photographic archives, donning it during performative sessions shared with her daughter. The result is a disturbing image in the most precise sense of the term: not merely strange or unsettling, but unheimlich in the Freudian and Heideggerian sense — something familiar rendered suddenly estranged, something that ought to have remained hidden and that surfaces with the force of an unexpected revelation. 

The mask, in the philosophical and anthropological tradition, has always occupied a paradoxical place: it is the device through which the subject conceals and simultaneously reveals itself, the porous boundary between persona and character, between authentic and inauthentic. In Heidegger, inauthenticity is not a moral failing but an existential condition: Dasein is always already immersed in Das Man, in the "one says", in the public average that levels differences and lulls into silence the proper voice of anxiety. The mask that Grzeszykowska applies to herself is, however, not the inauthenticity of social conformity — it is something subtler and more unsettling: the face of who one was, the ghost of a self that has ceased to exist but that the body carries as a silent stratification. To wear one's face at fourteen on the body of a mature woman is a gesture that compels one to question the continuity of identity through time: are we the same person? In what sense?

Heideggerian thrownness (Geworfenheit) — being thrown into the world in a body, in a time, in a history not chosen — finds here an extraordinarily effective visual figuration: the subject does not construct itself from scratch but inherits from itself, carrying the traces of what it has been without being able either to erase them or to identify fully with them. 

The encounter between the daughter in flesh and the mask-face of the mother-as-girl generates a relational stratigraphy of rare complexity: three temporalities overlap within a single image — the subject's past, the present of the body, the future embodied in the figure of the daughter. Parental dynamics, normally encoded within linear narratives of transmission and separation, are here short-circuited into a disturbing simultaneity that redefines the boundaries between generations as something permeable, oscillating, never definitively settled. 

Anxiety and Relational Complexity 

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
 — Søren Kierkegaard 

Heideggerian Angst — not to be confused with fear, which always has a determinate object — is the fundamental attunement that discloses to Dasein its own thrownness, its own being-in-the-world as a brute fact, devoid of ultimate justification. It is not an emotion to be removed but a revelation: that of the radical openness of existence, of its lack of ground. Grzeszykowska's work feeds on this anxiety without transforming it into tragedy. Her images — Domestic Animals (2022), Selfie (2014), Selfie with Dog (2023), recent sculptures, the Skinformer cycle (2024) — maintain a formal lightness, at times even a ludic quality, that paradoxically amplifies the conceptual density: the contrast between stylistic clarity and thematic depth produces a gap that is itself a generator of unease. This is, in Tatarkiewicz's vocabulary, the effect of great art: not the illustration of a theme but the construction of an experience in which form and content mutually implicate one another until they become inseparable. 

The dialogue between sculpture, photography and installation that runs through the entire exhibition is not merely formal: it is the manifestation of a practice that refuses the specialisation of the medium as an identity fetish. Grzeszykowska uses photography and video instrumentally — not to celebrate their specific ontologies but to construct ontological exercises tout court, perceptual situations in which the viewer is called not to contemplate but to confront, to measure themselves against their own corporeality, their own temporality, their own finitude. The body as an image in continuous redefinition — through time that passes, through relationships that transform, through masks that are donned and laid aside — is the constant cipher of this twenty-year research. 

The Threshold of Epiphany 

There is an epiphanic quality in Grzeszykowska's work that does not exhaust itself in immediate reception but continues to reverberate after the exhibition space has been left behind. It is the quality of those works that Tatarkiewicz would have recognised as belonging to the great tradition of art that transforms the perception of the real — not the art that beautifies or decorates but that which reveals, which opens rifts in the ordinary and shows within them the deep structure of existence. In this sense, All of a Sudden is a title that reveals itself retrospectively to be programmatic: this is not the sudden as accident, as a casual rupture of routine, but the sudden as the permanent structure of the real — the fact that every instant is, for those who know how to look at it, a threshold, a moment of opening toward awareness of what we are and what we will cease to be. 

The unease that this exhibition generates in the viewer is, in the end, its most authentic generosity. It offers no answers, no consolations: it offers instead the possibility of dwelling in the open territory of the question — about one's own identity, one's own duration, the relationships that define us and exceed us. It is an unease in the most ancient and fertile sense of the term, the one that Saint Augustine knew when he wrote that the heart is restless until it rests in that which grounds it. Whatever that ground may be — or whether it exists at all — Grzeszykowska does not name it. But the question, with its cutting precision, remains suspended in space along the trajectory of a body that becomes a clock hand, a face that remakes itself as mask, a time that continues inexorably to flow. 

The Fondazione D'ARC as Ontological Space 

It is not without significance that All of a Sudden finds its home at the Fondazione D'ARC, in the heart of Rome's Tiburtina district. The space itself is a stratification of heterogeneous temporalities that converses — silently but perceptibly — with the artist's obsessions: beneath the embankment of the structure rests a vast Roman domus; above it, the industrial memory of a concrete factory transformed into a place of contemporary thought. Founded by the collectors Giovanni and Clara Floridi and entrusted to the curatorship of Giuliana Benassi, the Foundation is an organism that does not separate past from present but allows them to coexist in productive tension. The permanent collection — which gathers works by Kounellis, Boetti, Kiefer, Kosuth through to the most recent generations — attests to a vocation for complexity that makes this place an adequate interlocutor for an artist like Grzeszykowska, whose work demands spaces capable of bearing the weight of the questions it poses. 

A Voice in the Tradition of the Body as Battleground 

Aneta Grzeszykowska, born in Warsaw in 1974, has over the course of twenty years constructed an entirely singular position in the international landscape — recognised by the presence of her works in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim in New York, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, and consecrated by her participation in the 59th Venice Biennale. Her training and practice inscribe themselves within a Central European tradition that has made the female body not an object to be represented but an epistemological field in which identities, power and collective memory are contested and negotiated. Director of the Studio of Performative Photography at the Academy of Art in Szczecin, Grzeszykowska works in that border zone between photographic discipline and performance where the image does not record an action but is itself the action — an act that transforms both those who perform it and those who receive it. Her presence in Rome — her first Italian solo exhibition after decades of international shows — marks a significant passage: that of an artist bringing to a Mediterranean context, laden with a different history and a different light, a sensibility formed in Eastern Europe, where the body has learned to carry the weight of history with an awareness that few cultures know as well. 

Aneta Grzeszykowska. All of a Sudden Curated by Giuliana Benassi Rome, 1 March – 24 May 2026 Fondazione D'ARC Via dei Cluniacensi, 128–130 00159, Roma 

Opening hours: Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday — 3:30 pm – 7:30 pm 

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