Rafał Bujnowski’s exhibition “May 2066” is a story about the pas­sing of time told in three chap­ters. The show starts with a video of a fit man doing his exercises in a white cube space: its 70-year-old protagonist, Włodek, has a body of a 40-year old and was first encoun­tered by the artist at a gym in Kraków. The next room is dedicated to pain­ting: abs­tract tondi and a monumen­tal study of the sky com­posed of 9 separate canvases. But it’s not simply pain­tings: all those works were treated with a special ageing procedure. Immediately after creating them, they were put into a climate cham­ber (used in com­merce on a daily basis to test the life-​span of some products or materials) and thus gained 50 years in just a few nights. The con­servator team has taken care of them after­wards, re-​stretching them back, waxing and var­nishing to avoid dim­ming the colors. The last part of the exhibition is a true sur­prise: there are two Mazda cars stan­ding in the middle of the gal­lery. They are both a popular model from the 1986, but were in fact never used and are still in the exac­tly same state as when they were produced. Brand-​old, so to speak.

Zachęta has also published a special (bilin­gual) catalog on the occasion of the exhibition, featuring an interview with the artist con­duc­ted by the show’s curator, Maria Brewińska. The whole print run of the publication has also under­gone the same ageing procedure as the pain­tings did.