My Heart Has Always Been a Hidden Bomb

“My Heart Has Always Been a Hidden Bomb” is an exhibition about the tension between tenderness and destruction — about emotions pulsing beneath the surface of everyday life.

The gathered works by artists of the 20th and 21st centuries — from Magdalena Abakanowicz and Alina Szapocznikow to Katarzyna Kozyra, Marc Chagall, and Wojciech Fangor — create a mosaic of human experience, where the personal intertwines with the universal.

Paintings, sculptures, objects, and photographs from the Voelkel Foundation Collection and the Wielkopolska Zachęta reveal the fragile boundaries between body and spirit, memory and oblivion, love and fear. Curator Prof. Marta Smolińska weaves these threads into an emotional landscape of contemporary times — filled with longing, unease, and a search for spirituality.

The title, taken from Dorota Masłowska’s novel The Magic Wound, refers to the hidden charge of human emotion — anger, desire, fear, and hope — that can erupt at any moment.

This is an exhibition about the power of emotions that define us in a world of unstable values and shifting borders.

The event’s visuals draw on details from Alina Szapocznikow’s Ventre (Belly) and Katarzyna Kozyra’s Women Are Waiting.

My Heart Has Always Been a Hidden Bomb
Curator: Prof. Marta Smolińska
Exhibition dates: 8 October – 21 December 2025