Zofia Kulik’s Ambassadors of the Past reinterprets the composition of Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors (1533), now in the collection of the National Gallery in London. Kulik and her partner, Przemysław Kwiek, take the place of the two ambassadors. In Holbein’s painting, scientific and musical instruments represent the knowledge and technologies through which his era understood the world. Kulik replaces these symbols with photographic equipment and everyday objects she used in communist-era Poland, turning them into signs of her own historical moment. Through this ironic substitution, Kulik and Kwiek become ambassadors of their own past, surrounded by objects that document the conditions and tools of their artistic practice.

Zofia Kulik (b. 1947, Wrocław) is one of the most significant figures in contemporary Polish art, internationally acclaimed for her monumental black-and-white photomontages that intertwine political critique, feminist inquiry, and formal precision. Her complex visual language is rooted in a rigorous analog technique developed over decades of intensive studio practice. This sustained commitment to visual and ideological complexity positions her as a key figure in both Eastern European and global female art. Kulik's work has been featured in major international exhibitions, including the 47th Venice Biennale (1997), documenta 12 in Kassel (2007), and Les Rencontres d’Arles (2023). Her work is held in the permanent collections of institutions such as Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Moderna Museet, and MoMA New York.

Milja Laurila explores the position of women in society since the early 20th century. Working with photographs from old medical books, she examines how women and their bodies have been observed, documented, and represented. Drawing on an archive she has assembled throughout her career, she revisits images of female patients who have gradually become deeply familiar to her, intertwining with her own memories and emotions. Through layered photographic collages, she brings past and present together, transforming the detached clinical gaze into a more personal and empathetic perspective. The cuts and fragmented surfaces suggest hidden aspects of human experience, questioning what lies beneath the visible image.

In Years, Days, Laurila brings these women into dialogue with natural stone. Both bodies and stones carry traces of time. The veins, layers, cracks and furrows of stone can resemble skin, while its structure records processes spanning millions of years. The works function as a double exposure, bringing together geological time, the instant preserved by photography and the fragile time of human memory. Geological processes erase and transform what came before, just as memories change or disappear.

Milja Laurila (*1982 in Helsinki, Finland) studied at Musashino Art University, Tokyo in 2008, before graduating from Aalto University in 2010. Her works have been exhibited internationally at various solo and group exhibitions, including the Brooklyn Museum (New York), LACMA (Los Angeles), National Gallery in Sopot (PL), Kunsthalle Helsinki, Fondation Hippocrène (Paris), MOCAK (Krakow), École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (Paris), and Borås Artmuseum (SE). Her works are also included in the collections of important American and Finnish institutions, such as LACMA, Helsinki Art Museum, Finnish Museum of Photography, Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection (FI), and State Art Collection (FI), in addition to private collections in Australia, Belgium, Finland, Germany, and Norway.