Ruins carry within them a sense of ambivalence. Despite their decay and destruction, they remain clear traces of human activity—not only relics of decline and transience, but also carriers of fragmentary memory. Still legible as part of the world of human artifacts, they are simultaneously subject to the constant interference of nature, which ruthlessly weaves them into its order and reshapes them. The issue of Warsaw's identity and Norbert Delman's work is similarly complex — belonging to a city marked by ruins and heritage. It is not merely a geographical or historical concept, but a complex emotional and existential experience.

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Shimmering Rubble is a story that goes back many decades and generations, but it is also a memory of childhood games in squares full of rubble — a material associated not only with decay, but also with new forms of life and creativity. In Delman's latest solo exhibition, it is not only a raw material for sculpture. It is also a metaphor for the transformation of the city and ourselves, an element of the urban fabric that has been present for centuries, a witness to tragic fates and the foundation of the present. Destruction here does not mean a fatal end, but becomes a starting point for a new order that does not cut off the past, but incorporates its traces into the present and future, marked by a raw presence and apparent disintegration.

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The artist's latest practice emerges from the melancholy of the present day, dominated by helplessness, frustration, and a sense of powerlessness. The global media discourse creates an image dominated by narratives of defeat and crisis, depriving societies of their ability to take effective action. Contrary to Kant's vision of a world free from war, the present seems to herald the twilight of humanism. The normalization of suffering and the constant stream of reports from armed conflicts have become everyday occurrences. At the same time, we are stuck in a paradoxical impasse, a guarantor of peace maintained not by consent but by the threat of violence. The exhibition deals with the refusal to be entangled in the experience of unstoppable injustice. Delman consciously rejects this monolith of hopelessness, proposing an alternative perspective — blooming ruins, metal buds unfolding above the remains of Warsaw houses scattered on the gallery floor, resembling a dead riverbed.

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The artistic process becomes a gesture of deep empathy, a ritual of embracing the “remnants” of forms of existence and experiences. Material that at first glance should be a symbol of decay and end becomes an organic metaphor for the force that sustains continuity and rebirth. In turn, rubble is a material trace of the past that prevents it from being completely erased. Shimmering Rubble speaks of hope, not in terms of banal optimism and utopian thinking, but of conscious emotional discipline and perseverance. The installations, like totems or obelisks—symbols of endurance and resistance to nihilism—remind us of the need for constant self-improvement and not giving in to discouragement.

Their melancholy does not consist in passive acceptance or resignation to loss. Rather, it is a kind of constant, subconscious presence of the past — a state that does not reject the pain associated with absence. Digging through the remains, welding, rummaging — these are creative gestures that become a metaphor for a new cognitive and cultural order. The artist reaches for the remnants of the existing order, giving them an autonomous form.

 

In turbulent times of climate depression and social helplessness, Norbert Delman's exhibition becomes a space for affirmation and reflection. It is a poetic tale of the passing of civilizations — whose downfalls are not the end of everything, but the beginning of a continuum in which fragments of reality always remain, reborn from the ashes. Each of them retains an echo of the whole, and the remains, the relics, are not a sign of the final end, but traces of a hidden fullness, the restoration of which requires patience and creative effort. Ruins thus become not only a testimony to the past, but also a promise of renewal, a record of existence that, despite its decay, continues to captivate.

 

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Curator: Marianna Lomza