The Rats, 2025

PETG, Paint, Wood

The Warsaw Museum of Literature

For the exhibition "To Be a Mouse," I was invited, by The Warsaw Museum of Literature, o create a work in response to the poem of the same title by the Polish poet Aleksander Wat (1900–1967). Wat's poem, written during his years of exile and chronic illness, meditates on the desire to escape consciousness itself. My installation, "The Rats," draws inspiration from both Wat's poem and the trajectory of his life, which spanned the turbulent first half of the twentieth century and bore witness to some of its darkest chapters.

Born in Warsaw to a Jewish family, Wat began his literary career as a futurist poet and co-founder of the Polish Dadaist movement before turning to Marxism in the 1920s. In 1939, he fled the Nazi invasion of Poland to Soviet-occupied Lwów, only to be arrested by the NKVD in 1940. He spent nearly two years in Soviet prisons, including the notorious Lubyanka. These experiences fundamentally transformed his understanding of the fragility of political ideology and led him to question his understanding of progress and history.

In 1988, the University of California Press published My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, a book drawn from Wat's conversations with Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz, recorded in Berkeley in the 1960s. In it, Wat traces his life through the volatile artistic and political worlds that emerged after WWI and endured through the violence of WWII and the Cold War that followed. The book stands as both a personal memoir and a testament to an entire generation's suffering.

In my installation, I tried to imagine what it might feel like for a writer to carry the weight of a life shaped by imprisonment, chronic pain, and what could be seen as ideological and national betrayal. The shift in my title from "mouse" to "rats" reflects this transformation: where Wat longed for the innocence and smallness of a mouse, I envision the rats—survivors, scavengers, witnesses who persist in the margins and ruins of history. In my work, the rats dance around a clock to an uneasy rhythm of time destroyed by memories, tapping out the troubling stories of life where dignity had to be won despite hardship, pain, and loss.