When Tomorrow Comes

We wish to advise that due to water and sewerage system failure, all tomorrow’s classes, i.e. Tuesday, February 14, 2025, are cancelled. Due to difficult weather conditions our water supply facilities and teaching rooms have been damaged. By the decision of the Management, all school operations remain suspended until further notice. Such an announcement could be displayed in one of the corridors of Martyna Pasternak’s school, yet you would probably need a magnifying glass to read its content.

In her solo exhibition When Tomorrow Comes, Pasternak continues to work on her diploma project carried out at the Academy of Art in Szczecin under Małgorzata Mazur, MA, PhD, and Agnieszka Grodzińska, MA, Dr. Hab. Our School was an object and video installation, in which the artist recreated from memory the architecture and furnishings of the school that she had attended as a child. The video, which was recorded using a scale model, captured  in a symbolic way the school mechanisms of control and punishment. In the documentary part, the camera watched a group of 8^th grade pupils indulging in small acts of sabotage during their free time. In one of the scenes, the girls block the sink drain with a chewing gum.

At the Gdańsk City Gallery, the artist looks to the future where fulfilled dreams mingle with catastrophic scenarios, often proving to be one and the same. For Martyna Pasternak, the journey back to school is not a mere exercise in memory and imagination: when she completed her studies, she started working as an art teacher in a high school of visual arts.

The concrete block without doors or windows, which you could only look inside through peepholes, is now losing its tightness, falling apart, rotting. The precisely planned and meticulously carried out destruction of the artist’s own work is not an act of capitulation, but of criticism.

Schoolgirls fantasise that the school building is being consumed by the force of the elements. Students from the Academy of Fine Arts fear they will have to destroy their works after graduating since there is nowhere to store them. High school teachers think every semester about quitting their job and finding a new one, better paid, less stressful and more respected.

The future looks bleak – for the young artists and the outdated education system, to say nothing of the climate, increasingly tormented by natural disasters. Perhaps the best way to tame those fears and unruly fantasies is to test them today, on a safe scale and under controlled conditions? Before tomorrow becomes today, and there will be no more time to imagine a different, better future.

The exhibition is the Gdańsk City Gallery’s award in the 2023 Best Art Diploma competition.