MINORIA: Receding Trace

MINORIA: Receding Trace presents a new chapter within the ongoing curatorial project MINORIA, conceived and directed by Monika Turczyńska, and developed in collaboration with Józef Krzysztof Oraczewski.

The exhibition is structurally linked to the preceding chapter, MINORIA: Condensed Trace, in which the image was brought to a state of concentration and near-stability. Receding Trace takes this condition as its point of departure, only to reverse its direction. What had already taken form is here drawn back into a state of latency, in which it no longer stabilises as an image, but remains unresolved.

This movement unfolds after the image has already been fully revealed. What had previously appeared in its entirety is not erased, but withdrawn beneath the surface. Form does not disappear; it persists as a latent structure — present, yet no longer fully accessible.

In this chapter, the image does not move toward completion. Instead, it begins to withdraw before it fully forms again, returning to a condition in which it remains suspended between presence and absence.

The works consist of burnt, folded and deformed sheets, carrying minimal traces of colour embedded within the material. These are not images in the conventional sense, nor remnants of completed compositions. Rather, they register a condition in which the image is held in suspension — neither fully present nor entirely withdrawn.

At the same time, the image is not only suspended, but actively interrupted. The introduction of large, monochromatic surfaces does not conceal what lies beneath, but arrests the process of formation itself. These interventions mark a precise moment of decision — a point at which the image is prevented from fully emerging.

What remains visible is therefore not absence, but tension. The underlying traces persist, compressed and partially withheld, generating a condition in which the image exists as both present and inaccessible.

Within MINORIA, the division into chapters does not establish a linear sequence, but reveals the fluctuating nature of the field itself. What appears as progression is in fact movement — a continuous oscillation between emergence and withdrawal, concentration and dispersal.

This dynamic is articulated through texis, understood as the formation of temporary points of entanglement, where forces intersect and briefly stabilise before dispersing again. Receding Trace remains in proximity to such points, without allowing them to consolidate into form.

Rather than presenting a subsequent phase, the exhibition introduces a movement inherent to the structure of the project itself — a return through which form withdraws toward latency, enabling its possible re-emergence.

The work captures not the image, but the moment at which it is stopped.

The image does not form.
It recedes.