Aleksandra Karpowicz: Remember What You Forgot

Remember What You Forgot presents Aleksandra Karpowicz’s reflections on the lived experience of illness and recovery, questioning the identities we inherit, accept, or are forced into. Moments of uncertainty open up space for reconnecting with inner peace, where attention shifts from imposed narratives toward our place in the presence. The exhibition showcases Karpowicz’s proposition that beneath every diagnosis lies the irreducible condition of being human. Returning to a state of inner peace that exists prior to identity, experience, and conditioning - before experience is cemented and before the accretions of conditioning take hold. Tracing not a journey outward, but an unravelling. A release of that which has obscured ourselves. The works emerge from a period of cancer diagnosis and treatment, not as documentation of illness, but as a moment that disrupted continuity. Rather than seeking meaning within crisis, Karpowicz turns towards what the interruption reveals: the accumulation of what has been gathered over time - fear, anxiety, shame, expectations, and inherited narrative - held, often unconsciously. Across photography, video, and mixed media, Karpowicz engages in the act of release. Medical objects are stripped of their emotional charge, their symbolic weight dissolved. Personal rituals become practices of presence - developing into methods for locating the self rather than escaping it. Experiences are named, contained, and brought to a point of closure. What was carried for years is no longer held in the same way. Nature appears throughout the works as a fixed point of orientation. It reflects a way of being that does not resist change. It is adaptive, unresistant, and unburdened by the need for a fixed identity - it does not accumulate beyond what is needed. This has become foundational for Karpowicz’s own process. The exhibition does not present transformation as becoming something new. It is a process of removing what is not essential and revealing what remains. Something that was never absent, only forgotten.