Anna Zaradny, Enjoy the Silence

January 24, 2026

ANNA ZARADNY | Enjoy the Silence

opening: 24.01.2026 at 6.00 p.m.

24.01–7.03.2026

curator: Katarzyna Krysiak

partner: The ING Polish Art Foundation

Enjoy the Silence is a soundless, contemplative video work composed of a series of sequences depicting splashes of matter that gradually form shimmering constellations.

The concentration on a single detail and the hyper-realistic recording of moments of surface disintegration clearly reference the tradition of structural cinema. Through its evocative use of movement and light, the video material can also be read in choreographic terms. The film transports the viewer into a realm that oscillates between outer space and an oceanic abyss, offering an opportunity for immersion in silence. Yet this sense of calm proves deceptive: the erupting matter generates intense auditory images that may heighten feelings of tension and anxiety.

Dominating the exhibition, Enjoy the Silence is accompanied by spatial installations that extend the film beyond the limits of projection. The artist materializes a selected frame, multiplying it within the gallery space and granting it the status of an object. The image is immobilized, assuming the form of a silent score. A fragment of glass, observed through a peephole in the wall, functions as a focal point, activating a relationship between vision and imagined sound. Another object – repeating the shape of the score and placed in a snowy landscape outside the gallery window – transfers the experience beyond the exhibition interior, intertwining the order of the display with external reality.

At the core of the installation lies the illusory nature of sensory perception. Images of shattered glass, coupled with the absence of an anticipated sound, place the viewer in a state of cognitive dissonance. The boundaries between materiality and ephemerality become blurred. The image seduces through aesthetic precision while simultaneously destabilizing the clear identification of matter, evoking associations with ice, water, or cosmic dust. The expectation of sound, combined with the tension between contemplation and the instinctive defensive reflex triggered by “exploding” matter, provokes somatic responses and affects the viewer’s nervous system. The slowed-down motion softens the violence of disintegration, offering a sense of calm while simultaneously taming fears of darkness, fragility, and sudden disruption. The work encourages the viewer to savor the silence.

Anna Zaradny’s work also resonates with ecological and climatic contexts. A shard of glass brings to mind a fragment of a breaking glacier – an ephemeral and fragile sign of decay unfolding before our eyes. The soundlessness of Enjoy the Silence stands in contrast to the problem of environmental noise pollution, one of the less visible consequences of accelerated civilization. In this way, the exhibition becomes both a space for mindfulness and stillness and a site for critical reflection.

A key reference for the exhibition is the concept of deep listening and the legacy of the musical and film avant-garde, including the work of John Cage. Silence here is not understood as absence, but as a strategy for intensifying perception – activating forms of listening that are potential, imagined, or impossible to register directly. Enjoy the Silence offers a liminal experience, suspended between sound and its negation, pleasure and anxiety, matter and its gradual dissolution. It invites the viewer to remain attentively poised, revealing both the deceptiveness of our senses and the fragility of the world it constructs.

Work: Anna Zaradny "Enjoy the Silence”, 2018, video 13’08”, The ING Polish Art Foundation collection

BIO:

Anna Zaradny (born in 1977) – sound and visual artist, composer, instrumentalist, co-founder of the Musica Genera festival and publishing house. Her work spans the fields of sound and visual arts. She is a classically trained graduate of the Academy of Music, where she studied saxophone and conducting. She draws on her experience in improvised and experimental music, treating instruments and other tools as an open, organic form. As a composer and instrumentalist, she moves across a broad spectrum – from acoustic improvised music with a minimalist contemporary idiom to structurally and compositionally complex, entirely electronic, experimental forms. Zaradny creates photographs and videos through scores, performances, objects, compositions and sound installations. She uses abstraction, micro-sounds and architectural objects, light and space to create acoustic environments that allow viewers to become part of the work and touch architecture on a sonic level, exploring non-verbal modes of expression through narrative or ideas. In this way, he questions the supremacy of the image, allowing sound to serve as an essential narrative signal that can be experienced with the whole body. In modified environments, with thoughtful lighting and sound design that stimulate an instinctive experience of architecture presented in a wide range of immersive spaces, he seeks connections between the human body, sound, space and technology, exploring cracks in sound and image, and creating moments of sensory penetration and the illusory nature of their perception. These works are characterised by the ambiguity of concepts and the relationship between ideas and the medium of form.