The current exhibition at Galeria Centrala in Poznań carries a striking sense of urgency. Although Anka Gregorczyk, the gallery’s co-founder and curator of the show, began planning it two years ago, its relevance has only intensified. At its centre is The Polar Silk Road, a series of images by Austrian photographer Gregor Sailer, marking the first presentation of his work in Poland and recognised as one of the gallery’s most important shows to date.
Galeria Centrala is a space dedicated to photography — and to photography that is, almost obsessively, focused on the notion of space and landscape transformed by human activity. Through its programming, it invites exploration of this hyper-specific pairing, examining how social, political, economic, and cultural forces intertwine with the concept of space and environment. The gallery is committed to asking difficult and uncomfortable questions. Here, photography is a vehicle for prying open urgent conversations about the state of the world today.
The exhibition takes place at a moment of deepening global shifts and regional uncertainty. Meanwhile, media outlets report that China has begun preparing a new transport corridor to Europe, rerouted through the Arctic to bypass politically sensitive regions, cutting transportation time by up to half compared to traditional sea lanes such as the Suez Canal. This move continues a strategy first outlined in 2018, when China’s Arctic White Paper introduced the so-called Polar Silk Road. As melting ice opens routes once sealed by permafrost, the Arctic is being redrawn as a new corridor of commerce, research, and territorial ambition — a frontier where states and institutions race to turn ecological collapse into opportunity, power, and profit.
China’s invocation of the “Silk Road” frames Arctic ambitions within a familiar narrative of circulation and exchange, mobilising historical memory to legitimise new projects. This is pivotal precisely because the Arctic has long been represented in Western traditions as remote, sublime, and outside of history or politics. The singular image of the region as a space of whiteness, emptiness, and purity has obscured the material forces that shape it. By invoking the “Silk Road,” the Arctic is recast not as exceptional or fragile, but as part of a longer, familiar story — a move that makes its transformation and exploitation appear not only permissible, but almost inevitable.
“The atmospheric and physical conditions of the region strongly determine the way it is represented. It is hard to imagine working in full sunlight, snow, at –50 degrees — with nothing but whiteness, wind, and the sensation of cold that penetrates the body”, reflecting on the visual representation of the Arctic to date, Gregorczyk emphasises how difficult it is to capture this environment. “This world appears in a particular way, changing under our presence only by adding further elements from the world that is familiar to us”.
In The Polar Silk Road, Gregor Sailer brings forth exactly that – the layers of our presence, the traces of humans etched into the landscape, making visible forces often confined to abstract theory. They take shape in the precise geometry of Canada’s North Warning System, the disciplined lines of Norway’s military installations, and the vast scale of Greenland’s EastGRIP project, among others.
“In The Polar Silk Road, Gregor Sailer brings forth exactly that – the layers of our presence, the traces of humans etched into the landscape, making visible forces often confined to abstract theory.”
Known for his work in hardly accessible and often overlooked places, Sailer has a keen eye for uncovering hidden realities. After projects such as The Potemkin Village and Closed Cities, where he exposed façades and illusions within urban spaces, the Tyrolean photographer spent five years visiting approximately 20 locations, most above the Arctic Circle and some just a few kilometres from the North Pole. The series shows how the national ambitions of countries like China, Russia, and the U.S. shape the Arctic, challenging the notion that the region is empty or untouched.
In Sailer’s photographs, rivalries over oil, gas, and rare earths – uncovered by melting ice – are visible even in remote, ice-bound sites, revealing geopolitical tensions in places most of the world will never directly encounter. For viewers in Poland, however, the experience is inevitably different. Distance and limited direct exposure to the Arctic mean that spectatorship is shaped as much by imagination as by knowledge. “The familiarity with the concepts, as well as an awareness of the presence and proximity of the Polar Silk Road, is well established in the Far North. However, very few people live there, and the voices of small communities have never really been heard”, Gregorczyk reflects. “If it weren’t for scientists working in polar stations, students taking part in polar expeditions, or photographers such as Gregor Sailer, Magda Biernat – whom we hosted in the gallery in 2019 – Michał Siarek, or, for example, the Danish photographer Jacob Aue Sobol, we would have no insight into how this region of the Earth actually functions”. As she further explains, what strikes Polish audiences as exotic is, for northern communities, a familiar truth – and the exhibition offers the rare opportunity for their perspectives to be seen and validated.
The exhibition presents work that has already circulated in galleries across Europe, yet here it gains a new context and urgency. The goal is not merely to display images, but to confront the gaps in our knowledge and the assumptions we carry about distant places. Gregorczyk describes her curatorial role as drawing attention to a phenomenon largely unknown in Poland and highlighting how much of our fear and uncertainty stems from ignorance. She emphasises that we have little sense of what the Northern Hemisphere looks like from the perspective of the North Pole. Our understanding is filtered through inaccurate representations, “even on Google Maps, which has become our standard conception of what the world looks like, we have no real chance to fully see these regions.”
This concern with what is known and what remains unfamiliar shapes guides how the images are framed, contextualised, and placed in dialogue with one another. It is a negotiation between familiar knowledge and the foreign, inviting viewers to confront both what they understand and what lies beyond their perception. “The challenge of presenting a highly documentary exhibition – interpreting but also presenting facts, both well-known and newly discovered – lies in finding a balance between the visual layer, which allows for free interpretation, and the need to approach it as a collection of information worth understanding through the lens of art. Freedom of interpretation, in an era of disinformation and widespread lack of knowledge about the topics addressed by the exhibition, can in this context be harmful… which is why I felt that revealing certain facts by showing what is hidden became simply a necessity. Visibility is not the same as being seen, and seeing is not the same as noticing”, explains Gregorczyk. It becomes a question of how much to disclose and how much to leave unsaid, how to balance factual accuracy with poetic resonance, and how to acknowledge the unseen forces – political, ecological, economic – that underpin what the viewer encounters in the gallery space.
Rather than a tension between photography as evidence – its role as surveillance, mapping, and proof – and photography as poetics, the curatorial stance embraces an alignment of the subconscious with consciousness. The romantic image of the Far North – its vastness, its unknowability, its seeming impenetrability – emerges less as a truth than as a veil, a curtain concealing both change and mystery. According to Gregorczyk, to move beyond this surface requires the shedding of illusion and the willingness to approach the unfamiliar as an opportunity to learn something new.
“The exhibition reveals not only fragments of reality but also the extent of our unknowing, exposing a world that remains largely unfamiliar. Where knowledge falters, imagination often steps in, shaping the void with uncertainty or fear.”
The exhibition reveals not only fragments of reality but also the extent of our unknowing, exposing a world that remains largely unfamiliar. Where knowledge falters, imagination often steps in, shaping the void with uncertainty or fear. Against this backdrop, The Polar Silk Road seeks to dismantle such barriers, encouraging viewers to linger with the images, to sense their beauty and mystery, while remaining attuned to the layered and complex narratives they contain. It is within this oscillation between awareness, imagination, and absence of knowledge that the experience gains its depth and resonance.
The Polar Silk Road. Observation of the Hidden
October 4 – November 30, 2025
Galeria Centrala, Poznań, Poland
