The exhibition “LET US PRAY” is a project that grows out of conversation – both the spoken and the silent kind, conducted between word and image, between writer and artist, between matter and meaning. The meeting of Zuza Dolega and Mariusz Szczygieł in 2023 began with fascination: he – captivated by the language of her works; she – working with a form that speaks even in silence.

It all began with the artist’s invitation to a conversation, which resulted in Mariusz Szczygieł’s column “Ash from Words”, published in Wysokie Obcasy Extra (No. 4(130)/2023). In this literary–artistic dialogue, both reveal their love for words, paper, and the materiality of print. This shared sensitivity to medium and detail became the starting point for their collaboration. Curator Emilia Orzechowska captured this moment of understanding and invited them to create a joint exhibition – a meeting of word and image, thought and matter.

What is personal here becomes universal. What is visible gives way to what is “in the cracks,” implied, immaterial. The cloister space of Galeria EL becomes a place of process: covering, revealing, naming, and leaving unspoken. Like in Cortázar’s Hopscotch, a recurring motif in Dolega’s work, she tries to “reach the word without words” – to immerse herself in what exists “in-between.”

The exhibition is part of a new curatorial series titled “Legible Image”, in which word and image are treated as equal languages of expression. In “LET US PRAY”, Szczygieł’s words do not serve as commentary – they are co-creators, partners, impulses, and matter for Dolega’s creative gesture. The author asks: How do you pray? To whom do you pray? With what intention? – and gives voice to those who pray: religiously and secularly, ritually and in everyday life, in silence, in whispers, or through gesture. Sixty people responded to this inquiry, sharing their personal experiences of prayer, from which the writer selected twenty-five testimonies. These became the creative material for the artist and the starting point for their joint exhibition.

These personal prayers, reflections, intimate whispers, and multi-voiced confessions became Dolega’s source material. Using her signature technique of pyrography – burning words into paper – she created for “LET US PRAY” a new cycle of works inspired by the form of a prayer book, yet transcending its framework, opening to the rituals of daily life and contemporary ways of seeking meaning and solace.

Her practice, deeply rooted in matter – often discarded, humble, yet charged with meaning – transforms into something syncretic and eclectic. Here, the word collides with the emptiness after the word. Waste becomes icon. The artist embraces transitional moments – darkening, eclipsing, being “in-between.” These are not states of suspension, but of tension – places where prayer can emerge as a creative act.

In the cloister of Galeria EL, prayer unfolds as an intimate performance between word and image, between faith and doubt, between the past and the present. This is not merely an exhibition – it is an attempt to capture what prayer might be today: a cry, a search for contact, an act of existing “elsewhere.” From these intimate answers, personal confessions, and fragments of thought, Zuza Dolega draws her raw material, employing the practice of blackout poetry – the art of finding new meanings in existing text. She creates from what is (not) hers, extracting a voice from another’s writing, transforming it into something personal yet capacious – able to hold the experiences of the viewers as well.

“LET US PRAY” is not an attempt to define prayer. It is rather a question about its place today – in a reality that is accelerated, fragmented, made up of countless voices and narratives. Prayer, in this sense, is not only a religious act but also a gesture of focus, persistence, and the search for meaning. It can be a plea, a supplication, contemplation, a sigh, or simply a moment of silence amid the noise.

This is an exhibition about transitions. About moments “in-between.” About what hides in the fissures – between meaning and its absence, between word and emptiness, between memory and forgetting. It is a space where image and text, artists and viewers, can linger together – in prayer, in silence, in questioning.

Zuza Dolega – born in 1990 in Gdynia, where she lives and works in the field of visual arts. Since 2012 she has specialized in pyrography, which she always combines with papermaking, textile art, and site-specific installations. She also creates monumental paper installations, collages, works in the spirit of asemic writing, blackout, and redacted poetry. Her artistic explorations also touch on issues such as the illegibility of writing, neuroaesthetics, and synesthesia in art. A graduate of the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, she is an assistant professor at the same faculty and holds a doctorate in fine arts. Her works have been exhibited and are held in collections in Poland, Germany, Denmark, Macedonia, Turkey, Tunisia, Japan, China, Australia, Argentina, and Ecuador. She is a member of the prestigious international association IAPMA. She has received numerous grants and awards, including the City of Gdańsk Award for Young Artists in Culture (2020) and is a laureate of the 2025 edition of the paper positions art fair in Berlin.

Mariusz Szczygieł – reporter, writer, and 2013 Journalist of the Year in the Grand Press competition. His book Gottland won the European Book Prize (2009) and France’s Prix Amphi (2008). He is the double laureate of the NIKE Literary Award (2019) – both the jury and readers’ prizes – for There Is No (Nie ma), as well as the NIKE of the 25th Anniversary. He is president of the Institute of Reportage Foundation and a lecturer at the Polish School of Reportage. His most recent book is a collection of essays on the craft of nonfiction, Facts Must Dance (Fakty muszą zatańczyć). He graduated from the Faculty of Journalism at the University of Warsaw and completed postgraduate studies in modern art history at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Legible Image – a new exhibition series at Galeria EL

“LET US PRAY” is the second exhibition in the new curatorial series Legible Image, following “It Doesn’t End” by Justyna Tomska and Łukasz Dziedzic. Initiated by Emilia Orzechowska at Galeria EL, the project is based on collaborations between visual artists and word artists – writers, poets, dramatists. The aim of the series is to create a space where image and word function as equals, complementing and engaging in a dynamic creative dialogue. Legible Image is a curatorial experiment that assumes the symbiosis and coherence of the exhibition – where text not only accompanies images but also materializes within the exhibition space, becoming its integral part.