JEŚLI/TO [IF/THEN]

How do we tell stories today, when narratives no longer follow a single line but branch, fragment, or collapse into error? JEŚLI/TO [IF/THEN] is a group exhibition that explores the conditional grammars of storytelling in the age of algorithms, games, and digital culture. 

The title, borrowed from programming, refers to the most basic conditional: if this happens, then that follows. It is a structure we recognize not only in code but also in prophecy, fairy tales, and daily decisions. Each action unfolds between condition and consequence.

Twenty-three international artists and groups—2Girls1Comp, Andrei Chodera-Isakau, Anna Bidzilia, Cassie McQuater, Dorijan Šiško, Filip Kostic, Jan Możdżyński, Janne Schimmel, Joshua Citarella, Kévin Bray, Léa Porré, Levi van Gelder, Lucie Gottlieb, Maciej Krygier, Sara Bezovšek, Sebulec, Sonia Górecka, Theo Triantafyllidis, Tomas Sjögren, Wendi Yan, Wojtek Didkowski, Yi Xie, and Yuliia Frolova—explore narrative as both technology and ideology. Their works use game mechanics, interactive installations, speculative fiction, and glitch strategies to show how stories can be written, rewritten, or disrupted.

The exhibition suggests that we live in a post-narrative condition, not the end of storytelling but its overflow into new forms. Stories appear between what we choose and what chooses us, across screens and devices, beneath conscious thought. JEŚLI/TO [IF/THEN] shows how even the smallest choice, a look, a step, a pause, can redirect a story.

At the same time, many works embrace breakdowns. Glitches, stutters, and errors are treated not as failures but as methods. They create cracks where new meanings slip through, moments where the story branches unexpectedly. These fault lines point to the politics of narrative: who gets to tell the story, who is written in, and what is left unsaid.

The exhibition also asks how game logic influences the way we understand life itself. Save states, respawns, grinding, NPCs and main character roles no longer serve only as metaphors but as conditions through which reality is experienced and imagined. JEŚLI/TO [IF/THEN] does not use games to illustrate art, but to show how games have always been tools for rehearsing reality, and how reality increasingly resembles a game.

In the layered spaces of Ujazdowski Castle, the exhibition is accompanied by a narrative that moves alongside the artworks. It acts as a guide, a counterpoint, and sometimes a disruption, reminding visitors that every exhibition is also a story being told and uniquely experienced by them.

Curated by Sara Szostak and Marta Grytczuk, with executive production by Julia Lipiec, narrative design by Stanisław Święcicki, exhibition design by Elżbieta Szurpicka, and visual identity by Alexey Layfurov, JEŚLI/TO [IF/THEN] proposes no solutions and offers no escape routes from our conditional present. Instead, it provides a space to encounter these conditions consciously, critically, and playfully.