Visible Futures
Maison Markul, Paris – Art Basel Paris, 24–26 October 2025
“Your silence will not protect you.” — Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action
After the debut of "Wearable Art – Unseen Threads" at Daimaru Shinsaibashi in Osaka, where it formed part of the cultural programme accompanying Poland's participation in EXPO 2025, the project evolves in Paris as "Visible Futures." The Osaka installation spread across floors and windows of the department store and wove together textiles, sculpture and photography; it revealed hidden narratives and amplified voices excluded from mainstream fashion. Building on that success, Visible Futures shifts the axis from "unseen" to "visible," inviting the viewer to consider how futures are made perceptible.
In Paris, the project inhabits Maison Markul, a nineteenth-century hôtel particulier that Angelika Markul and Arnaud Lutellier have opened as an artist's residence, creative studio and gallery. Their home offers visitors a one-of-a-kind experience; it houses Markul's carefully curated art collection built over a twenty-five-year international career. During Art Basel Paris, this domestic space becomes a site-specific installation where fabric, sculpture and image function as equal instruments of meaning. The curatorial decision to situate the exhibition in a private residence – rather than a neutral white cube – foregrounds questions of intimacy, hospitality and the politics of display.
Visible Futures treats fashion as a critical medium. Joanna Hawrot's wearable art does not decorate the body; it records and transmits experience. Patterns, cuts and movements form a semantic structure in which garments articulate tensions between personal memory and collective history. Angelika Markul's sculptural works lend material weight to this dynamic, anchoring intangible emotions in wax and other matter. Zuza Krajewska's photography strengthens the relational character of the project; her images do not simply document but actively participate in the formation of narrative, capturing moments when clothing and body define each other. Together, these works show that visibility is not an innocent category but a site of negotiation and power.
A core conceptual reference remains the Japanese jūnihitoe – a Heian-period twelve-layer court dress. Historically, the jūnihitoe comprised multiple kimono-like robes layered so that the colours and textures of each garment were visible; the number and arrangement of layers signified season and status. In Visible Futures, this practice becomes a narrative method: layers operate as temporal and semantic strata that allow past, present and possible futures to coexist and condition each other. Into this structure enters a new protagonist – a young pregnant woman. Her presence introduces the dimension of beginning and an embodied future. She is not an allegory but a participant whose scale, tempo and sensitivity redirect attention from retrospection towards that which is just taking shape.
The Paris iteration combines works from Osaka with new pieces. It maintains a dialogue with the Polish School of Artistic Textiles and the legacy of Magdalena Abakanowicz, not through direct quotation but through an awareness of textile as an autonomous medium capable of shaping space and social relations. In this context, fabric, sculpture and image are treated as equal agents. Maison Markul's architecture, the presence of sculptures and the choreography of light co-author the narrative; they dictate the pace of movement and the frames of view, making visibility a deliberate construction rather than an obvious gesture.
An integral element of the programme will be a dance performance. Developed in collaboration with the artists, the choreography introduces the body into dialogue with space and costume. Movement becomes another medium of storytelling; it accentuates the themes of visibility and transformation and forges a temporary community between performers and audience. Unlike the voguing performance presented in Osaka, this new work will respond specifically to the architecture of Maison Markul and the evolving narrative of the exhibition.
Visible Futures proposes a polyphonic process – a meeting of material, image and body in which visibility is enacted, not assumed. The exhibition asks: what is seen, for whom, and how? The epigraph from Audre Lorde underscores that futures require both action and form. In Paris, Joanna Hawrot, Angelika Markul and Zuza Krajewska, under the curatorship of Paweł Pachciarek, craft a clear and attentive form that looks toward what is still in the process of becoming.