Rebellion and discontent bring any utopia to life. In her latest painting series, And Rivers Will Flow with Date Syrup, Ania Grzymała expresses her dissatisfaction with the existing world. She dreams, fantasises, anticipates, designs and experiments. She is not afraid of developing a social imagination, even at the cost of being accused of infantilism or naivety. In her latest paintings, she starts with the classic closing phrase used in fairy tales ‘and they lived happily ever after’. She asks what utopia could look like and what would have to be done collectively to make it happen. She writes a fairy tale and paints pictures that are based on it, depicting the stages of society’s evolution towards a ‘better world for all’.
In her paintings, the Pope will talk to dolphins, businessmen will sit in school desks, ‘seeds of hatred’ will be taken out from under their hats, and the party will end with a Ku Klux Klan man, an otter and a Muslim woman bathing together in a jacuzzi. Despite the symbolic punishment of the ‘aggressors’ and perpetrators of injustice, Grzymała is far from moralising and imposing ethical judgements. The world she depicts is governed by the logic of a carnival. Everything in it is topsy-turvy, social roles are reversed and impossible things do happen. Through the ridiculousness of fairy tale events, she draws attention to the absurdity and arbitrariness of the existing political and social reality. The artist believes in the agency and performative power of words and images. She writes and paints her utopia from a ‘contextualised’ perspective. In contrast to well-known historical utopias, she does not place it on a remote island or in a fantasy land. He locates it distinctly ‘here’ – in Poland, among the blocks of flats of southern Warsaw borough of Ursynów, in an eastern European metropolis, a few hundred kilometres away from the ongoing war, in a country politically polarised and struggling with economic inequality.
The exhibition is accompanied by a radio show featuring a fairy tale available on headsets at the exhibition and online. The artist also invites the public to write down and share their world improvement ideas. This is the first step towards collectively inventing a better reality. So let us start by being very dissatisfied.

Curator: Michalina Sablik
Co-ordinator: Kaja Werbanowska
Partners: Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, ENTRY Initiative