In the Ateneum Gallery in Katowice, a group exhibition titled “Don’t Go into the Woods After Dark” opened on June 19. It can be viewed until July 3, 2026. The exhibition is presented as a companion event to the IMPULS Katowice festival, organized by the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. This project takes art beyond the university walls, creating an urban festival of art and design and encouraging dialogue with the public in the city space.
The exhibition’s title, “Don’t Go into the Woods After Dark,” recalls a childhood warning, but also becomes an invitation to enter a world full of mystery, unease, and fascination. For centuries, the forest has been a space of symbols—it provides shelter and life, but it can also engulf, disorient, and transform. This duality has become the starting point for the presented works.
The works by students and graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, as well as artists connected to the Silesia region, become “creative organisms” forming a single complex ecosystem. Some are interested in matter and what it remembers—wood, clay, the smell of overworked oil, or even skin marked by the trace of a tattoo needle. Others focus on boundaries: between the sacred and the profane, between what is hidden and what demands attention, between freedom and mechanisms of control. Today, the forest speaks to us quite literally—through a sound installation built from field recordings of forests near Sejny.