Public Transport Project | Warsaw 2025

Public Transport Project
Warsaw 2025

Nov 22, 2025 — Jan 17, 2026

Public Transport Project is a collective initiative by Gloria Viktoria Regotz, Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas, and Philip Ortelli. Their ongoing work examines how public life is formed through systems of coordination, between people, infrastructures, and the objects that enable or organize movement. Cities appear not as fixed entities but as ongoing negotiations between human and non-human agents.

The exhibition titled Warsaw 2025 dissociates the city as a geographical place and thinks of it as a format: a coded system of routines, expectations, and alignments (relations). The title follows the collective’s internal taxonomy for their works. A methodical system for labeling, sorting, formatting, standardizing, and categorizing that not only names the works, but also dictates how they materialize.

Public Transport Project's practice is concerned with nameless figures caught between order and deviation—bodies navigating pre-determined routes, anxious to belong, yet drawn to resist. Warsaw 2025 translates a bureaucratic system into performance, sculpture, moving image, body, scent, and sound where all unfolds under and beyond control.

Opening:

Saturday,
November 22
5 — 8 pm

Performance:

Saturday,
January 17
4 pm

Performers: Katarzyna Salinger, Piotr Rościszewski, Gloria Viktoria Regotz, Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas, Philip Ortelli

Meeting 1

At this point, I know very little. We meet on a video call: their names are Gloria Viktoria Regotz, Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas, and Philip Ortelli. I will delete my notes from this conversation because of misconstruing so many details, but the core is emotionally clear from the start. That each of them is quite different, and that they create through persuading one another of their ideas, and their collaboration is a process of searching for something independently, but finding answers together. A method of course-correction, the protocol relies on their difference. As we speak, an AI assistant program joins us on the call, slightly memento mori-like, a silent anchor in time.

Most of all, I am mistaken in thinking that in their previous performances, groups of actors in office clothing were disrupting the daily commutes of corporate workers at train stations and other public spaces in Lausanne or Renens. In truth, there was no disruption: the performers’ gestures were subdued and spaced out in time so that they could be mistaken for the real thing, like nothing more than a group of commuters looking at their phones. The group’s first keyword arrives here: staging the real. Their representation only has to deviate so slightly from reality to strike the uncanny into focus. 

And from the deviation is derived their next keyword: the norm. If normativity is a character, in this exhibition it is played by the DIN format, the holy geometry of the A4, A3 or A2 pages and their perfect relative proportions to one another. The artists show me pictures from the studio — I see parts of taxi cabs, DHL delivery vans, private vehicles. The car parts, sourced from the outskirts of Warsaw, will be cut into the familiar rectangle size that I imagine this sentence will be printed on, too. The result, they hope, will be an act of translation: the process of transforming one thing (an idea) into another (an object) with a bit of inevitable imprecision involved. If John Chamberlain and Donald Judd created American Minimalism out of the chopped-up metal detritus of Detroit’s automotive industry, then what is becoming of the Warszawska Taksówka here, and of the normative printer page?

For now, we don’t know — they are about to travel to Warsaw and visit the metal workshop, to see with what power bureaucratic geometry can be applied to a Mercedes hood. The performance poses a challenge, too: they worry about the gallery space alienating the performers too much, making the exhibition seem like a backdrop, making objects even more object-like instead of life-like. We hang up; Philip’s AI assistant sends me a summary of our call. It’s reductive and corporate — ‘actionable’ — and embarrassingly accurate for it. 

Meeting 2

In our second meeting, I get gently corrected for my misapprehensions, and we get realigned — touching base. The AI assistant’s summary, which I insist is a good metaphor here, claims that we identified the core conceptual hesitation about the upcoming performance. I enjoy its condescension.

Since the last time we spoke, the artists brought the car parts they scavenged into a family-run metal workshop outside of Warsaw. They like the workshop; the machines slice sheets of metal with a high-speed stream of water. I am reminded of fracking, which also uses extremely pressured water streams to fracture rock. Though we’re not mining fossil fuels here but cars as a subject, many complications arise in the process: issues of arcane 3D rendering and the bits of sculpture-making that approach engineering to make A4, A3 and A2 cuts accurate. I can’t follow this part over a call. They will have to explain in person later; the point is decision-making under pressure, relinquishing control. They tell me they create by and without control; they follow the possibilities that are left by failure.

And failure is inscribed into the challenge of translation, which is what they do: translating one thing into another. The norm of the DIN format is translated onto a car, which is an object that also conforms to a whole symphony of norms, standards, guidelines and safety protocols. The artists describe it as an assisted project of training one object into becoming another, with the necessary failure that comes along with this; objects do not learn. But they do something else — they submit and resist at different points. The outcome is constrained but not impossible: something slips off between the layered norms.

Translation also fails literally — their video work filmed in Shanghai involves their friend, a performer here, chatting with a taxi driver. The first attempt at translation is in their friend’s interpretation of their score for the performance. But the next comes with presenting this work abroad: the language resists. How would you say ‘are you here as a tourist’ in Polish? The Polish gallery staff tasked with translation are not sure. We shall see how the subtitles are finally phrased; for now, language is winning one over control.

And with the performance, how to relinquish control? Reappropriating the appearance and codes of normalcy has been the tool they have worked with so far: “staging the real”. If people passed their performance, they did not recognise it as such: they would think they were witnessing something real, and perhaps something disappointing. But this time, the artists wish not to represent structure but rather to break it open. How to disrupt this normalcy instead of re-representing its defeat? How does a body exit that system? Neither I nor the artists will know until they are in the space, responding to it, figuring it out. For now, they tell me the printer from the gallery office might make it into the gallery space: this press release shall be printed on it.

Meeting 3

Palpable excitement on this call — they have now moved the works into the gallery from the studio. Like a bag emptied, turned inside out, the studio is gutted while the objects breathe in the monastic, echoing gallery space. Relief.

The arrangements are falling into place intuitively: the visual of A2, A3 and A4 car parts arranged in grids and stacks is immediately striking. I don’t see it yet, I’m not in Warsaw, only hear their descriptions: the cars’ rough materiality seethes in the clinical gallery lighting and smudges of dirt are kept on purpose. The works are systematised in series: some are ‘Folders’, upright and stacked on the floor like file organisers. Some are mounted on the walls, others lean against it, each a separate but continuous series. More parts could be added, numbers expanded, but the logic in place strives to stay the same, until it fails: the practice is rules-based but with the assumption that rules break down. 

While we talk, outside is a clear-skied day of winter sunlight and the artists’ faces are aglow with peace from witnessing their own protocols work out. Whatever they were expressing before, they tell me, is best articulated here. They found that the wordless and abstract translation of geometry and engineering in metal, rubber and glass has been their most successful speech yet. Something detached, cold and distant about the gallery space produces the energy they have so far only captured with performances; and so they have stopped feeling that to stage the performance here is a challenge. The space itself is now ‘almost a protagonist’, and the performers will be a stack of their own.

Three perfume bottles on the floor form another system, made with the scent of gasoline, wet soil and rain, but without the molecules that stabilise the vapour: it changes rapidly and dissipates soon after. That volatility is a term used in finance is of importance. 

There is a suggestion that the gallery office printer might make it into the show. Tomorrow, they start rehearsals. 

Meeting 4

This is our first time meeting in person and the exhibition opens soon; right off the bat, I chide them for not telling me about the massive monolith that towers over the exhibition. It does seem perfectly Freudian, though, that the great totemic fetish should be the one overlooked before, as if too much to mention. 

The tower is a disused billboard erected on its side and turned to face the wall. Its advertising sheet has been stripped off and its neon lightbulbs replaced with therapeutic ones: the exploitative object translated into a healthsome one. It simulates sunlight, so if you stand in front of it for long enough, your body will start producing Vitamin D — and you participate in a bioperformance, quip the artists, only half-joking. 

An evil counterpart to the medicinal light is installed in the entryway of the show, where warm lightbulbs have been replaced with the cheapest industrial equivalent of sunlight simulation — neon tubes of offensive brightness designed to stimulate the office worker. Below them, Gunia Nowik Gallery’s office printer sits on the floor like a politely submissive readymade: it will be used throughout the exhibition as and when the staff need printing. As I have intuited earlier, it will be the one used to print the A4 sheet you’re reading this from. 

Above the printer hangs a portrait, one of the few instances of a human presence in the show. It is also printed on A4 and framed cheaply, generically. The person in the photo is one of the performers from Public Transport Project’s previous performance, and along with the woman in the other photograph, they remind us of the thematic continuity of everything the group articulates: all stacks and series are related.

The other trace of human presence is both more ghostly and more embodied: on the walls are scuffs and marks left behind from the performers’ touch. While I visit it during installation, the traces I see are still from the rehearsals: they will be painted over and scuffed again during the opening night, to remain here onwards. As for the performance itself, I find out that it involves a cellist and a pole dancer, and most likely all three of the artists; but I’m not supposed to know much more. I can hear some back and forth, mutual persuasion about whether to keep to their score or choreography, or to relinquish control — this I know to be a central part of the rehearsal process, to unravel the rules-based practice.

But it unravels through objects, too, and such is its strength: the final system I see comprises all the car windows, which they couldn’t cut into any shape, stacked plainly against the wall. These items resisted their process of translation, of applying the DIN system onto car parts — the tempered glass would have shattered, its material logic stronger than the artists’ protocol. The failure of the process is an equal subject of the exhibition, and the series might in the future come to include other types of objects that for various reasons resisted submission to the Project’s logic. 

Finally, I see the video: their friend filming her taxi ride around Shanghai. The route was arranged in collaboration with both the driver and the passenger, passing by several locations of significance to either of them, or ones the artists wanted to capture on camera. The video is cut up and looped: we never see them arrive at any destination nor set off towards another. The conversation, though partly scripted and partly improvised, is wrung out of as much personality as possible: only their most generic statements and sentiments survive in the narrative. This level of banality took months to produce. It is beyond the real, a staged glimpse towards yet a deeper layer of artifice and life coexisting; in a few days, we shall see it performed.

Epilogue

I suppose this is for those who visit the exhibition without having attended the opening performance – hello. What you missed was this knot of artifice and life I described above tightening: reality interjected in the artists’ plan beyond the assumed element of improvisation. 

As I walked in, I heard a cello playing but could not see one; squeezing through the crowd, I could spot the three Public Transport Project members joined by Katarzyna Salinger, the dancer. I say ‘joined’ but they were quite separate, each carving out a pocket of space among the audience. They cycled through a sort of setlist of scores dressed in office wear, the black suits and grey skirts and white shirts ruching and creasing with their repetitive movements. The moods were sometimes robotic, sometimes erotic, sometimes mechanical or obsessive or sensual. Without acknowledging the audience around them, they focused on elements of the space: grinding against the floors, windows and walls, staring at them, crawling, knocking, bashing into them. Reiterating until they reach some sense of completion, maybe. When one movement ended, the performers eased and switched places at a leisurely pace, manoeuvring through the crowd the way any other visitor would get across the room. It had the rhythm of a gym routine, a set of reps at timed intervals. They later told me the pace was intuitive, worked out in rehearsals: they had no way of communicating to each other that one was finished with their set, yet their internal body clock ticked on somehow. 

And so: the mechanical and the sensual. The body as it enters an exhibition of metal. After our last conversation, they showed me some quotes they had pulled from J.G. Ballard’s Crash and Georges Bataille’s Death & Sensuality, their own research notes. I think they toyed with the idea of providing them to the performance audience and must have changed their minds, so only I ended up seeing the references. This makes sense. The performance spoke for itself. But to the reader who has not seen it, I can add that these are some links the movements drew: that our organisms submit to and resist norms as the car submits to and resists the A4 format, and behaviours spill out from these contradictions. Eroticism is one such spillout, psychoanalytically repressed, and violence is another, and economy is a great machine churning it out of us. And economy finds its terrifying new ways of imposing itself on us, and life finds its way with and around it, as if playing “by and with control”. 

And here the trouble of life and labour came to work its strange ways: the cello I looked for in the performance was not there. The cellist, Piotr Rościszewski, was rushing on his way to the opening by way of a Lime scooter, an object of sinister city economy that could have almost made it into the exhibition. As if scripted, he crashed: he spent the duration of the performance at the nearest hospital’s emergency room. I saw the photo, one of his bow fingers bent sideways, alarming and Cronenbergian. He texted it minutes before the performance started – the artists settled for playing a tone-setting track they used in their rehearsals. He joined us later in the night, feeling okay, his vulnerable human hand propped up with metal and bandage as if locked in a finger-shaped mould; a walking, mocking Oscar Wilde cliché on life imitating art. 

Piotr is doing well. Another performance is pencilled in for January. Unless the artists conclude that this was, despite everything, the most expressive outcome that could have occurred. 

Public Transport Project is a Swiss-Lithuanian artist collective founded by Gloria Viktoria Regotz, Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas, and Philip Ortelli. PTP explores the dramaturgy of everyday life through collaborative, physical research, staging reality and the familiar through performance and installation. Their choreographed narratives investigate the machinery of capitalism, corporate hegemony, and the layered systems structuring contemporary life.

Working at the blurred thresholds between public and private spheres, the collective examines the codes that shape these environments and the behaviors that dominate them. At the core of their practice is a sustained interrogation of the individual’s place within society—a bodily and sonic investigation of collision, collapse, vulnerability, repetition, slowness, speed, and malfunction. Their work reflects a persistent tension between collective longing and personal alienation, revealing the fragility of human connection in a profit-driven world. Public transportation functions as a central metaphor, evoking the mapped-out networks that direct movement and mirror the orchestration of the masses by political and corporate forces.

For Les Urbaines in 2024, the collective staged two performances in train stations and presented the installation Terminus 1, created in collaboration with BURRI Public Elements and incorporating public infrastructure such as a bench, a streetlamp, and litter bins. The installation also included a five-channel video work and large-scale prints on adhesive foil covering much of the exhibition venue’s facade.

Earlier that year, PTP presented Warsaw 2024, a performance developed during a residency at the U-Jazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, along with Radio Warsaw 2024, a mobile sound intervention linking exhibitions across Warsaw during Gallery Weekend. Through a free taxi service and an additional car parked within an exhibition space, the project transmitted sound works by 15 international artists, presented in vehicles provided by BMW.