A Sanatorium That Was Never Built Appears in Warsaw
Belarusian artist Aliaksandr Adamau has installed a fragment of a fictional institution inside the Museum of Free Belarus in Warsaw. The exhibition, titled hyperMother. Shared Breathing, forms part of the Warsaw Gallery Weekend program and presents visitors with something between a waiting room and a sanatorium foyer: calibrated lighting, sound, vibrations, and objects that can sometimes be touched and sometimes, for good reason, should not be.
The premise is deceptively simple. A system designed to relieve an exhausted person of the burden of monitoring their own condition gradually accumulates enough authority to decide what is good for that person. The exhibition does not resolve the tension; it stages it.
How hyperMother Grew Into a Long-Term Project
According to reform.news, which spoke with Adamau ahead of the opening, the project was not planned as a series. Looking back across five years of work, the artist recognized that questions of care, hyper-care, supervision, and control had surfaced repeatedly across separate experiments. Those threads were eventually gathered under a single name.
The name itself arrived unexpectedly. Adamau has described coming up with the phrase "hyperrealistic mother" while walking his dog, struck by the collision of two conceptual registers: "mother" as one of the earliest and most intimate words a person learns, and "hyper" as a prefix that has attached itself to almost everything connected with technology and the digital world. One register is soft and internal; the other is cold and contemporary. Both, he notes, are all-encompassing.
The first exhibition in the series, HYPERREALISTIC MOTHER, opened in December 2025 at Galeria Szczur in Poznań. Its centerpiece was a children's interrogation room, a space designed to feel safe and calm for a child while simultaneously enabling observation and recording. After that show closed, Adamau concluded the subject was not finished.
Rooms That "Get Stuck" in Real Spaces
Rather than rebuilding the same environment each time, Adamau works with a principle he describes as "getting stuck": rooms from the fictional hyperMother institution drift into actual museums and galleries and temporarily remain there. The children's interrogation room got stuck in Poznań in 2025 and is getting stuck in Słupsk in 2026. The waiting room has now gotten stuck in Warsaw.
This approach lets the artist avoid constructing a totalizing installation. Instead, fragments of a nonexistent institution accumulate across different cities and buildings, each shaped by the architecture it temporarily inhabits. At the Museum of Free Belarus, Adamau is working with a room of roughly 100 square meters with high ceilings inside a historic building, and he has been explicit that he does not want to disguise or neutralize that context.
The Warsaw branch of the institution focuses on "shared breathing" as a calibration procedure. Sound and vibration set a common rhythm; the system determines when to slow down and offers rest without being asked. Visitors can stay, interact with objects, read texts, and listen. The opening performance, Initial Calibration, featured performer Zuza Szczepańska reading in parallel from three books, each offering a different model for responding to the world around us. Incomplete presence and fragmented attention were treated as valid modes of participation.
The exhibition runs until 4 October 2026.
Why It Matters for Hosts
Warsaw Gallery Weekend draws a concentrated wave of culturally engaged visitors who actively seek accommodation close to participating venues. Independent operators near the Museum of Free Belarus or in central Warsaw have a short but reliable window to attract this audience. Highlighting proximity to the program in listings and communications, and keeping availability open around the weekend, is a straightforward way to capture guests who plan their trips around the arts calendar rather than conventional tourism.
Details were first reported by reform.news, which conducted an interview with Aliaksandr Adamau ahead of the exhibition's opening.
First reported by reform.news.