Minh Lan Tran's Monumental 'Rdzeń' Installation: A Contemporary Art Exhibition in Warsaw

This exhibition features a monumental, site-specific installation by Minh Lan Tran, created for the museum's staircase. The artwork, a nineteen-meter-long sheet of latex, explores themes of life and death, materiality and energy, engaging with the surrounding architecture and urban landscape.

Minh Lan Tran's "Rdzeń" is a monumental installation created specifically for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw's staircase, expanding abstract painting into a dialogue with architecture. The artwork is a single, nineteen-meter-long sheet of natural latex, suspended vertically like a scroll. This semi-transparent membrane interacts with light, gravity, and movement, prompting reflection on the boundaries between life and death, materiality, and energy. The choice of latex, derived from the sap of rubber trees, carries significant symbolic weight, referencing the extraction process and bodily fluids. This motif connects to the surrounding urban environment, including the nearby theater construction site and the imposing Palace of Culture and Science, evoking images of a wounded or burnt earth. Tran's work addresses this landscape of transformation, where the 'wound' is inflicted not by a tool, but by light piercing the surface through a skylight. The production history of latex in colonial Vietnam, a site of extreme exploitation, is also referenced, highlighting its role as an export commodity and a catalyst for anti-colonial resistance. Tran applies shellac, a resin from the lac beetle, to the latex surface, a material obtained through processes of harvesting, crushing, washing, and heating. These materials, shaped by extraction, labor, and transformation, situate Minh Lan Tran's work within broader contexts of colonial violence and ecological exploitation. The artist's gestures—tearing, burning, stitching, incising, and erasing—are inscribed on the surface, appearing as acts of repair suspended between care and violence. Using materials like shellac, earth, fire, charcoal, and pigment, Tran treats the surface as a field for abstract negotiation rather than representation. Stains and traces accumulate in a state of tension, pulsing between fragility and durability, opacity and permeability. The semi-transparency of the latex evokes both a membrane and plasma. The membrane acts as a threshold, a thin layer that separates yet facilitates the transmission of energy and light. Plasma, understood as the fluid part of blood or the fourth state of matter, refers to a highly conductive, ionized medium carrying energy. Tran conceives of the work's surface as such a plane of exchange, capable of absorbing, releasing, and regenerating energy within the architectural and social field it co-creates. In this sense, the abstraction becomes embodied and temporal, shaped by movement, light, and time. Evoking the motif of a veil between life and death, the work references Buddhist concepts of materiality and impermanence, resonating with the words of Mahmoud Darwish, inspired by Chief Seattle's statement: "There is no death, only a change of worlds." The vertical orientation of the installation connects what is above and below—earth and skylight—the two poles of architecture. The precise positioning of the work relative to the skylight allows light to penetrate its center and fall to the floor, activating the surface as both a passage and a filter. While the architecture suggests upward movement, Tran counterpoints it with a downward motion. The installation responds to the flow of bodies moving up and down the stairs, crossing their trajectories. It can be read as both ascent and descent: emerging from the earth and returning to it. This logic is reinforced by the creation process itself—the artwork originates in the museum's basement, and its assembly is an act of elevation, from below to the surface, and then upward. Painting here becomes a conversation with the subterranean, mediating between earth, body, and light.

Admission to the exhibition is free of charge. The museum's general admission policy may apply for entry into other areas or for specific times. It is advisable to check the museum's website for current visiting information and potential ticketing requirements for the building itself, though the exhibition itself is free.