SANARE, KAROLINA ŁEBEK
Friday 27th June 2025
Palazzo Contarini Polignac
Dorsoduro 874, 30123 Venice
sanare (from Latin: to heal) is a 4K moving image installation presented as an 18-minute loop, accompanied by a printed poetic text that invites viewers into a space of reflection, meditating on trauma, identity, and collective healing. This newly completed work receives its premiere at the event.
Rooted in personal memory and collective history, sanare revisits a formative journey undertaken by the artist in 1996 to Krynica Zdrój — formerly a Łemko village called Krzenycze — in the Low Beskids of the Carpathian Mountains. Krynica (from Polish: source), celebrated for its mineral water springs, fresh air and mountain views, is now the site of one of the largest Polish sanatoria, a type of medical spa providing space for communal convalescence and rest. The core and the foundation of healing treatments and rituals available in Krynica Zdrój remains the act of drinking mineral waters from five active springs.
This trip, leading to the heart of a Łemko region of the Carpathian Mountains, existed as an initiation, the first introduction to a cultural identity that has been erased from Łebek's upbringing through taboo and generational trauma, related to the Soviet occupation of Poland post WWII, and ethnic cleansing of this region, culminating in Operation Vistula in 1947. The Łemko ethnic minority was forcefully resettled mostly to former German territories of Lower Silesia, where the artist's family resides today. Stepping out of the car in 1996, following a long drive into the mountains, Łemko language was no longer whispered — it was no longer taboo. Instead, it was spoken freely amongst Łebek’s family members who the artist met for the first time, unaware of their existence, or an area called Łemkovyna, in other words, home.
Thus, sanare, through ‘meeting by the waters’ and participating in the healing rituals of sanatoria, is an observation and an invitation to collective healing. Partly a poetic interpretation of the universal meaning of the source, partly a meditation on trauma, identity and our connection to the natural world beyond the physical, this work is a gentle call for a return towards the sacred knowledge of nature, a shared capacity for repair, reconnection, and belonging.
By submerging in time, the artist imagines a different future where the empty spaces that once held Łemko communities within this landscape were once again full of their song, and living water quenched forgotten thirst by remembering all those who are displaced.
Written by Karolina Łebek
Edited by Dobromiła Błaszczyk
Karolina Łebek is a visual artist whose practice spans video, photography, sound, installation and live performance. Her work explores themes of consciousness, ecology, and mental health. She explores the sacred, the ritual, and the body in the context of geological time. Concerned with generational trauma, histories of migration and displacement, and the intersections between human artefacts, psychology, and ancestral knowledge, Łebek’s work embraces a poetry of decay and transformation that rearranges history to shed new light on the present. Through the desire to capture the affect of memory, she’s expressing subtle and perturbing worlds within oneself and those around us, building her lexicon of symbolic language, populated by unspoken narratives and haunting material mysteries. Her most recent projects: Shall Leave No Trace, a group exhibition by s.e.e anew collective (Royal College of Art in London, 2025), seło, live performance, part of the The Ark exhibition finissage (Krupa Gallery in London, 2025), new sound performance as part of the Walk So Silently That the Bottom of Your Feet Become Ears event (Magazzino Gallery in Venice, 2023). She lives in London and works internationally.
This project is co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland from the Culture Promotion Fund.
Cultural event of the Polish presidency of the Council of the EU.
