Half-Sleep
08.10.2026 - 10.01.2027
Trafostacja Sztuki, Szczecin
Art curator Ada Kusiak
Basia Bańda’s solo exhibition approaches insomnia as a dark and unsettling experience, one that eludes rational description. Bringing together the artist’s most recent paintings, embroideries, and objects, the exhibition invites us into an ephemeral, peculiar space suspended between worlds. These works are traces of sleepless nights, records of an experience Bańda began to encounter regularly in March 2024, when, after waking too early, she found herself unable to fall asleep again.
The first part of the exhibition grows out of this deeply personal experience. Bańda turns her attention to the nights she has spent awake, using her own perspective as a point of departure for a more expansive investigation. What begins as an intimate account gradually opens onto a universal question: what happens when sleep, something so fundamental and seemingly automatic, becomes inaccessible?
The second part of the exhibition considers the more common causes of insomnia and the many ways in which people attempt to cope with it. For months, Bańda immersed herself in books devoted to sleep, gathering seemingly minor, often surprising fragments of knowledge. Brought together, these observations reveal sleep not as a simple state of rest, but as an extraordinarily complex phenomenon involving the body, the psyche, and biological processes that extend beyond the human.
Quotations drawn from these publications become the titles of the works. Precise, disarming, and suggestive, they guide the viewer towards images that might otherwise resist interpretation. In some cases, the titles sound like fragments of a biology textbook, describing sleep with the detached precision of physiological observation. Elsewhere, scientific language gives way to the vernacular, whose blunt directness unsettles the authority of the preceding descriptions. The juxtaposition of apparent opposites is central to Bańda’s practice and is perhaps most palpable in her visual language. Her paintings hold together what seems incompatible: the soft and the dissolving alongside the precise and the solid Pink, a colour that has long been present in the artist’s work, takes on a different meaning here, no longer referring to corporeality or eroticism. Although we remain in the bedroom, the space becomes, above all, a place of nocturnal wakefulness. Pastel colours and blurred forms evoke the drifting sensation of consciousness slipping away. Yet within this hazy, almost weightless space, sharply defined figures emerge. These forceful elements interrupt the delicacy of the surrounding matter, demanding attention like an intrusive thought that refuses to let the mind settle. It is precisely within this tension - between surrender and resistance, between drifting away and remaining relentlessly present -that the essence of half-sleep emerges.
Half-Sleep
08.10.2026 - 10.01.2027
Trafostacja Sztuki, Szczecin
Art curator Ada Kusiak
Basia Bańda’s solo exhibition approaches insomnia as a dark and unsettling experience, one that eludes rational description. Bringing together the artist’s most recent paintings, embroideries, and objects, the exhibition invites us into an ephemeral, peculiar space suspended between worlds. These works are traces of sleepless nights, records of an experience Bańda began to encounter regularly in March 2024, when, after waking too early, she found herself unable to fall asleep again.
The first part of the exhibition grows out of this deeply personal experience. Bańda turns her attention to the nights she has spent awake, using her own perspective as a point of departure for a more expansive investigation. What begins as an intimate account gradually opens onto a universal question: what happens when sleep, something so fundamental and seemingly automatic, becomes inaccessible?
The second part of the exhibition considers the more common causes of insomnia and the many ways in which people attempt to cope with it. For months, Bańda immersed herself in books devoted to sleep, gathering seemingly minor, often surprising fragments of knowledge. Brought together, these observations reveal sleep not as a simple state of rest, but as an extraordinarily complex phenomenon involving the body, the psyche, and biological processes that extend beyond the human.
Quotations drawn from these publications become the titles of the works. Precise, disarming, and suggestive, they guide the viewer towards images that might otherwise resist interpretation. In some cases, the titles sound like fragments of a biology textbook, describing sleep with the detached precision of physiological observation. Elsewhere, scientific language gives way to the vernacular, whose blunt directness unsettles the authority of the preceding descriptions. The juxtaposition of apparent opposites is central to Bańda’s practice and is perhaps most palpable in her visual language. Her paintings hold together what seems incompatible: the soft and the dissolving alongside the precise and the solid Pink, a colour that has long been present in the artist’s work, takes on a different meaning here, no longer referring to corporeality or eroticism. Although we remain in the bedroom, the space becomes, above all, a place of nocturnal wakefulness. Pastel colours and blurred forms evoke the drifting sensation of consciousness slipping away. Yet within this hazy, almost weightless space, sharply defined figures emerge. These forceful elements interrupt the delicacy of the surrounding matter, demanding attention like an intrusive thought that refuses to let the mind settle. It is precisely within this tension - between surrender and resistance, between drifting away and remaining relentlessly present -that the essence of half-sleep emerges.