if/then • Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art
• Warsaw, POLAND • 2025
Group Show
How can we tell stories today? Narratives no longer unfold linearly – they branch, fragment, and mislead. The group exhibition IF/THEN at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art examines the conditionality of the linguistic rules from which stories are constructed in the age of algorithms, games, and digital culture.
The exhibition also asks how the logic of games shapes our understanding of life. Save points, respawns, grinding (the repeated performance of a monotonous action), NPCs (Non-Player Characters controlled by the computer), and the roles of main characters cease to be mere metaphors: they become the conditions through which we experience and imagine reality. IF/THEN does not use games to illustrate art; it assumes that games themselves are tools for experiencing alternative worlds, even as reality increasingly resembles a game.
if/then does not propose solutions or offer an escape from our conditional present. Instead, it opens a space for a conscious, critical, and at times playful encounter with these conditions.
if/then | Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art
Curated by Sara Szostak, Marta Grytczuk
03.10.25 - 15.02.26
Artists: 2Girls1Comp, Andrei Chodera-Isakau, Anna Bidzilia, Cassie McQuater, Dorijan Šiško, Filip Kostic, Jan Możdżyński, Janne Schimmel, Joshua Citarella, Kévin Bray, Léa Porré, Levi van Gelder, Lucie Gottlieb, Maciej Krygier, Sara Bezovšek, Sebulec, Sonia Górecka, Theo Triantafyllidis, Tomas Sjögren, Wendi Yan, Wojtek Didkowski, Yi Xie, Yuliia Frolova
Works shown:
• Armour Bright (I) (2025)
• Tis the ending of all moist things (2024-5)
• Versaliae - Talismans (2021-5)
