My series titled *Gemmakabinet* reflects on the relationship between culture, power, and memory as manifested through the institutionalized functioning of a given era. At the heart of the series lies the problem of the vulnerability of identity, historical memory, and cultural autonomy. The portrayal of institutional operations is not merely an internal critique but part of a broader social diagnosis: how culture becomes a tool when a system seeks to impose its own logic upon it.
The photo-based images are the result of visual experiments created through the collaboration of individual artistic creativity, image-editing software, and AI. The scenes depicted in today’s cultural institutional spaces simultaneously highlight and subvert European, mythological, and artistic traditions. The influence of Jan Lenica, Wiesław Wałkuski, and Jakub Erol was decisive in the creation of the series: Lenica’s surreal, absurd-leaning formal language, Wałkuski’s condensed, conceptually powerful visual language, and Erol’s clean, reductive compositional style collectively shaped the visual attitude evident throughout the series.