In September 2016, London hosted the city’s first design biennial at Somerset House. Among the exhibits, the Polish Pavilion showcased Cadavre Exquis: An Anatomy of Utopia, a unique and imaginative concept conceived and curated by Maria Jeglińska and Klara Czerniewska.
Created especially for the biennial, their installation questions how the 21st century creates space for new utopias, reflecting on the numerous crises and failures of modernist social, political and urban projects from the previous century. Borrowing from the form of the surrealist word association game, the “exquisite corpse”, it invites the viewer to act as a co-creator of a proposed narrative. By assuming the role of the wanderer, visitors face a choice between their own path towards an idyllic utopia or a disturbing dystopia.