Stach Szumski’s exhibition Culture of the Burnt Horizon draws upon the oldest known architectural forms created by Homo sapiens in what is now Eastern Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic period.

The site-specific installation, situated in the central nave of the EL Gallery, has been conceived in direct response to the building’s architecture. Its principal point of reference is a structure discovered in Mezhyrich, Ukraine – erected some 16,000 years ago from mammoth bones. The animals’ skulls and jaws formed a circle within which a fire was lit. It was central to the life of the first communities: their daily routines, rituals and strategies for survival all unfolded around the hearth. Traces of similar constructions have been found in Kraków, along the Dnipro River, and in Russia. All these sites were likely united by a single impulse: the desire to transform raw nature into a space safe for human habitation.

In his work, the artist explores the circulation of calcium carbonate – the building material of bones and organically derived sedimentary rocks such as limestone. Within an architectural context, calcium carbonate has accompanied humanity since time immemorial: from caves forming within limestone cliffs, which served as our earliest shelters, through Palaeolithic mammoth-bone dwellings, to the industrial lime used today.

Culture of the Burnt Horizon also addresses life on the edge of a retreating ice sheet, a condition that shaped the existence of the peoples inhabiting these lands in the Upper Palaeolithic. Migration in step with the withdrawing glacier – the thawing of new horizons – is echoed in the soundscape composed for the exhibition by Nestor Peixoto Abale (Aethereal Arthropod). It incorporates recordings of cracking ice and the sounds emitted by melting glaciers.

Szumski approaches time through a cyclical lens. He refers to the circulation of natural processes and to symbols and motifs that mutate across history. He studies pre-Christian ritual architecture, creates forms inspired by Neolithic and Palaeolithic worship, and analyses cultural codes and their transformations over centuries.

By engaging with signs, he reflects on shifts in identity, environmental adaptation, social change and globalisation. In his practice, particular emphasis is placed on the migration of motifs across cultures – a process in which ideas, artistic practices and belief systems cross geographical borders, shaping and enriching communities and their histories. Migration unfolds on many levels, from religion and art to new technologies. For Szumski, symbolism is foundational; it is through symbolism that his work acts upon the viewer.

Szumski works across a range of media. The exhibition features large-scale textiles, sculptures and a site-specific installation. Some of the sculptural works are based on 3D scans of mammoth bones and ceramic casts. A monumental textile suspended above the main entrance of EL Gallery alludes to the crystalline structure of a snowflake documented under an electron microscope, evoking the relationship between Upper Palaeolithic peoples and the receding glaciation.

The desacralised church transforms into a place where time and culture are ground together. Rituals from millennia past reclaim their lost space, and archaic practices enter into dialogue with the history of the site.