From July 12, Polish street art can be experienced inside the Palace of Culture and Science, presenting hundreds of new works by over 50 outstanding urban artists. Murals, graffiti, stencils, stickers, sculptures, graphics, installations, and more come together in one powerful exhibition.

The exhibition is accompanied by Urban Art Academy—a program of talks and meetings with artists and experts, as well as screenings of specially prepared documentaries and animations.

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I am pleased to be among the artists creating the 2025 edition, “Deconstructive Reconstruction,” curated by Marta Kowalewska and Bukola Oyebode-Westerhui.

The artist’s best-known project is Harmony—an urban art initiative inspired by lace-making traditions. Working with a restrained palette dominated by white, NeSpoon creates large-scale murals, illegal stencil graffiti, ephemeral site-specific installations, and a form she pioneered herself: ceramic objects known as “urban jewellery.” Through her practice, the artist searches for universal codes of beauty and harmony that are recognizable worldwide, thereby connecting people across cultural boundaries.

The Harmony project brings together centuries-old craft traditions with contemporary forms of expression. NeSpoon builds an intergenerational bridge of understanding and explores the extent to which street art can be transferred into the gallery space without losing its authenticity and credibility. Her practice examines the tension between the grassroots, spontaneous, and at times anarchic creativity of street art and the presentation of art within a formalized institutional context.

In the Urban Jewelry series, the artist employs traditional ceramic techniques to create labor-intensive, decorative ceramic objects impressed with lace patterns. Each object is produced in two identical editions. One—affixed somewhere in the street—enters the urban space, while the other becomes the core of an exhibit named after the location where its “twin” counterpart was installed. NeSpoon playfully describes these pairs as “quantum entangled.” If one listens closely with an attentive ear, it is said that the sounds of a distant metropolis can be heard.

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.NeSpoon has been working at the intersection of urban art, ceramics, painting, and artivism since 2009. In her work, she addresses social and environmental issues such as deforestation, industrial animal farming, the impending global water crisis, the flood of advertising, disinformation and post-truth, or the traumas of war. In her expression, she seeks what unites rather than what divides; she prefers to say “yes” rather than “no.”

Her most famous project is “Harmony” – urban art inspired by lace-making. Using a limited color palette dominated by white, NeSpoon creates murals, illegal stencil graffiti, site-specific installations, and ceramic jewelry objects. She seeks fundamental codes of beauty and harmony that are readable all over the world. She does not shy away from decoration, treating it as the first and primary layer of reception of her works, which adorn public spaces in over 100 cities in 44 countries on 5 continents. The “Harmony” project combines the achievements of centuries-old traditional craftsmanship with modern means of expression, building an intergenerational bridge of understanding. The urban art of NeSpoon can be viewed from many perspectives. On the one hand, its sociological and anthropological aspects are visible. During her travels, the artist explores the five-hundred-year history of lace-making, studies available historical sources, visits museums, talks with still-active lace-makers, and observes the spread of lace patterns with the advancing process of world colonization over the past centuries.

NeSpoon analyzes the beginnings of lace-making in the context of even older intercultural connections. The first lace-making manuals, published in Venice in the mid-16th century, drew inspiration from already developed Islamic ornamentation, which in turn drew from even older Indian designs. This is why when NeSpoon adds color to her works, it is easy to associate them with Tibetan mandalas or Moroccan ceramics. This shows a deep, intercultural aesthetic bond based on so-called sacred geometry. Certain patterns, proportions, structures, and harmonies are instinctively recognized and readable worldwide. Symmetrical, regularly repeating patterns were considered manifestations of the mathematical perfection of the absolute and are also present all around us – in the skeletons of sea creatures, snowflakes, flower chalices, and frost patterns on windows. This is why they seem familiar and local everywhere.

In its early centuries, lace was a manifestation of power, wealth, and luxury, accessible only to the elite. A delicate collar or wedding veil represented the value of even years of work by a skilled lace-maker and fetched prices equivalent to several kilograms of gold. This is why, when prices fell with the Industrial Revolution, lace appeared in almost every bourgeois home as a symbol of wealth and good taste. The 19th and early 20th centuries were the era of aesthetic dominance of lace. Factories producing it were equipped with the most modern technology of the time and provided employment for hundreds of thousands of workers.

The feminine aspect of lace-making, probably the most female-dominated field of applied art, remains significant in NeSpoon’s work. Over the five centuries, it was practiced and developed almost exclusively by women. Female lace-making circles have offered their participants economic and emotional support for centuries. This aspect of lace-making is one of NeSpoon’s areas of interest. The feminine specificity of lace patterns is still relevant today: over 80% of those following NeSpoon’s work on social media identify as women, highlighting the strong cultural and emotional connection with this craft. Although NeSpoon’s art is not directly feminist, it is hard to deny its deeply feminine character.

NeSpoon also seeks answers to the question of the possibility of transferring street art to galleries without losing its authenticity and credibility. Her works explore the tension between the grassroots, spontaneous, and often anarchistic form of creativity that is street art and attempts to show these works in the formalized gallery space. Her “Illegals” series of paintings is simply a chronicle of illegal stencil graffiti, painted on city walls worldwide, its record and archive. NeSpoon recreates the rough textures of old walls on canvases and then stencils her designs, just as she does on the street.

Her ceramics represent a completely different approach to combining gallery art with street works. Each ceramic piece is created in two copies. One is stuck somewhere on the street, while the other becomes the heart of an exhibition object, named after the city where she left the twin piece. NeSpoon jokingly claims that both objects are quantumly entangled – if you listen closely, you can hear the sound of the distant city’s street.

Transferring a mural to a gallery is the most challenging, if not impossible. However, the era of social media allows for the condensed experience of muralism – both the reception of the work and the impression of its creation – in the form of short videos, called reels.

The exhibition is accompanied by a site-specific installation similar to those NeSpoon creates in public spaces. It was woven using lace collected from the inhabitants of Łódź. NeSpoon’s installations are often interpreted as a visual representation of the network of human connections and relationships.

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🔸 ARTISTS for HUMAN RIGHTS 🔸

What is the most important human rights?
For me personally the answer is obvious. The most important thing I talk about in my work is the right to access to clean water.
In the project “Imagine A World Without Water” I spoke about it since 2016

The access to clean water for all living humans is the basis Human Right.

In July 2010, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing that – the right to safe, clean, safe drinking water and sanitation is an indispensable right to enjoy life and human rights to the full – (A / RES / 64/292 of July 28, 2010).

The European Pillar of Social Rights proclaimed by the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission on 17/11/2017 foresees an explicit reference to the right of citizens to water and sanitation under principle 20 – “Access to essential services”.

Furthermore, the problem of access to water was the first European Citizens’ Initiative having gathered the required number of signatories. The name of it was Right2Water. It was submitted to the Commission on 20/12/2013:

https://europa.eu/citizens-initiative/water-and-sanitation-are-human-right-water-public-good-not-commodity_en

2022 is a special year – we can all see how threatened Europe’s energy security is. All of us will be affected by the unprecedented increase in energy prices. The consequences will be very serious. This could have been avoided by timely political decisions and increasing independence from single source supplies.

At the same time, in 2022, severe droughts caused water shortages in many EU countries. So far, the main response to this crisis has been only a temporary reduction in the supply of water for economic purposes. Drinking water is still flowing from the taps in our homes, the toilets are still working, the prices have not increased significantly. Due to climate change, however, this problem will increase in the coming years. What if we do not create a mechanism to shield EU citizens from the long-term effects of this process?

I would like to find the answer to this question in my artistic action, which I will carry out in the building of the European Parliament as part of your artistic initiative. In order to get our representatives to think and act, I would like them to feel the effects of a possible water crisis on their own skin. On the agreed day, the day of the plenary session, during the busiest hours, I would like to completely close the water in all parliamentary buildings for 4 hours. The action must cover all restrooms, restaurants, cafes, offices and any water abstraction points for human use. Of course, water must be available for critical building infrastructure, e.g. in fire protection installations.

A few days earlier, messages saying “Imagine A World Without Water” will appear in toilets, restaurants and in the aisles. These will be stickers, posters, monitors, or even text messages.

Details of the project are to be discussed in detail. It is a complicated logistics operation that requires a group of motivated volunteers. The project budget must possibly include compensation to restaurants and cafes for losses caused by the action. There must be cisterns in front of the building from which drinking water can be drawn. Prices for bottled water available in restaurants must increase during these hours, e.g. fivefold. And so on.

The implementation of the project is likely to cause outrage and protests from parliamentarians and employees. I believe it will work to our advantage and will raise the profile of the project, even in the mainstream media and internationally. We must also be prepared to respond to what we want to achieve by implementing such an action. The answer to this will most likely be a detailed analysis of the documents created in connection with the Right2Water initiative. To what extent have the solutions proposed at that time been implemented? In the event of extreme drought on land, do we have alternative sources – for example, means for desalinating sea water? Should we increase our efforts in this direction now, not waiting for a repeat of the situation in the energy market (single source dependency)?

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Ceramic street art is a heart of creation of NeSpoon, clay is her primary material. It was ceramic objects with lace motiffs that were the first works she placed on the street in 2009. Over the last 13 years, she left several hundred of such laborious pieces on the streets of numerous cities around the globe.

All over the world one of the most popular ways to decorate ceramic dishes is pushing the lace onto fresh clay. This is how the pattern is created. One day NeSpoon realized that these motifs are intriguing on their own, they don’t need a functional reason such as a plate or a mug to exist. She started to make such no-purpose lacy objects and glue them onto walls.

Each ceramic lace is made in two copies: one is left somewhere on the street, the other becomes the center of the fragile art object. The title of each work is the name of the city in which the second copy of the lace was left. Such works are shown at the exhibition on the subject of O.D. Gallery.

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