PTP Warsaw 2025

The performative strand of Warsaw 2025 exposes the working body as a precarious instrument — absorbed into the machinery of production, stripped of subjectivity, and disciplined by the coded routines of contemporary life. In the gallery space, performance becomes a diagnostic tool: a way to examine how labour choreographs our gestures long after we clock out.

The performers — Katarzyna Salinger, Gloria Viktoria Regotz, Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas, and Philip Ortelli — move through a sequence of gestures drawn from everyday professions: the supermarket cashier, the banker, the designer, the waiter. These roles dissolve into a shared vocabulary of repetition, strain, and automation. Individuality thins; what remains is a body calibrated to serve, circulate, and comply.

Yet Warsaw 2025 refuses to end at the critique of capital. Instead, it opens a fissure: a space where desire interrupts function. Echoing Georges Bataille’s notion of the “little death” and J.G. Ballard’s erotic technologies, the performances reveal how bodies oscillate between discipline and excess, utility and abandon. The working body slips — almost involuntarily — into the register of eroticism, waste, and disorder. It’s in this slippage that agency briefly reappears.

Within the context of the exhibition’s sculptural environment — cars dissected into quasi-anatomical fragments, DIN-format panels that buckle under pressure, a landscape of chrome wounds — the performers animate the show’s central tension: the merging of human and machine. Their movements suggest a choreography of resistance, collapse, and metamorphosis.

By staging the body as both object and desire, Warsaw 2025 invites a closer look at the intimate mechanics of power: how we are shaped, consumed, repurposed — and how, even within systems that seem total, the possibility of rupture persists.