Video installation by the Polish artist Agnieszka Mastalerz
The exhibition at the Serra Moresca of the Musei di Villa Torlonia is part of the programme through which the Polish Institute in Rome promotes internationally the most significant emerging research in the Polish art scene.
Agnieszka Mastalerz's research investigates the control mechanisms that shape bodies and regulate relationships between individuals, communities, institutions and the natural environment. Through video, performance and the use of scientific imaging techniques, the artist explores the way in which cultural norms, social structures and biological processes intertwine, giving form to dynamics of discipline, adaptation and resistance.
The title of the exhibition, The Props Assist the House, takes up the poem of the same name by Emily Dickinson. The image of the structures that make the construction of a house possible becomes the metaphor for those devices, visible and invisible, that support and at the same time condition the construction of identity.
From this perspective the exhibition route takes shape, reading Mastalerz's work through the prism of choreography, understood as a language capable of oscillating between discipline and freedom, control and expression.
The space of the Serra Moresca hosts the video installation Supports (2021) by Agnieszka Mastalerz, a video born from research into the steel structures used in horticulture to guide the growth of plants. If on the one hand these supports favour their development, on the other they determine their form and direction. In the work, a performer interacts with three steel sculptures made to the measurements of the artist's body, transforming the gesture into a reflection on the relationship between constraint and the possibility of movement. Inserted into the architecture of the Serra Moresca, the work activates a dialogue with the place, questioning the relationship between nature and artifice, organic growth and technical control.
At the Polish Institute in Rome the route continues with a selection of works that explore the artist's main areas of research. Nodes (2024) traces the botanical history of the orchid, from its ancient association with aphrodisiac properties to its contemporary industrial production. The video installation Remainder (2025), by contrast, starts from an investigation of modernist architecture, transforming choreography into a tool for reclaiming space and imagining alternative forms of dwelling. The route is completed by a selection of images from the series Supports (2021–2026), in dialogue with the work presented at the Serra Moresca.