Where the Arboreal Conceals, What Endures

Monika Dorniak / Martyna Miller
cur. Marketa Dolejsova

The duo exhibition, “Where the Arboreal Conceals, What Endures?”, unfolds as a porous membrane between the forest’s understory and the architectures of memory, inviting visitors to drift among residues, ruptures, and fugitive traces of conflict.

Thematically rooted in the artists’ sites of field research in Germany and Poland, West-Eifel’s moss-thick silences and the arboreal post-hurricane presence of Bory Tucholskie are not merely referenced but metabolised—transposed into a choreography of found timber, ambient frequencies, and video apparitions. Here, the forest is not portrayed as a passive vessel, but as a shifting, recalcitrant composer—its matter and memory neither fixed nor fully retrievable, always in the process of becoming or vanishing.

Wooden forms, scavenged from sites of entanglement, punctuate the space as apparent witnesses—less relics than present artefacts. They refuse the neatness of chronology, instead proposing a kind of arboreal simultaneity: rings and splinters as timelines folded and knotted, a refusal of linearity in favour of haunted recurrence. Sound and image seep through the installation, layering the air with echoes—auditory strata that refuse to settle, inviting the body to attune to what is withheld, what is seemingly lost. The forest’s archive is unstable, always at risk of being overwritten by moss, rot, or human forgetting; yet it is precisely in this precarity that new imaginaries flicker.

Dorniak and Miller’s practice is not a search for closure, but for openings: gaps where memory might leak, where the forest’s agency disrupts the forensic gaze. Their gestures dwell in the unresolved, the spectral, the almost-vanished—where the landscape is both a site of disappearance and a generative matrix for what might yet endure.

Presented in the prolific context of the MSA Prague conference, this work sidesteps the comfort of disciplinary borders. Instead, it proposes the forest as a more-than-human co-composer of memory and forgetting, a space where the archive is always partial, always in flux. Here, memory is not only preserved but also undone, displaced, composted—inviting us to inhabit the uneasy interstice where loss and persistence blur.

What endures, when the arboreal conceals? How do we seek continuity through absence? What is the role of non-human agency in shaping collective memory? Those pondering questions echo through the gallery space, in the shadows, and in the spaces where the forest refuses to be seen.