Warm Ice Cream
Marta Bogdańska
online exhibition
Warm Ice Cream
Marta Bogdańska
From 02.02.2026
Curator: Maja Czechowicz
As a child, you live in the here and now. You don’t know what is the exception and what is the norm. And it seems obvious that this ‘here and now’ can simultaneously connect Poland and Libya, snow and the Sahara.
Years later, I look back on the days I spent between Warsaw and Houn, knowing that my experience was similar to the memories of many children whose parents went to work in African countries. And with the awareness that, at that time, it was not obvious at all.
Curatorial text
Warm ice cream, apart from its name, shares little with real ice cream – only the wafer and the shape, everything else is a sweet, sticky mass. In communist Poland, it was one small expression of an economy of shortages, a system forced to rely on substitutes. Today it can serve as a symbol of the childhood of the late-socialist generation – a time shaped by PRL realities and by dreams of a colourful world abroad.
For some of that generation, the imagined “abroad” unexpectedly became part of everyday life – though not in its capitalist form. In the 1970s and 80s, contract work in so-called “friendly countries” such as Libya, Iraq, and Algeria gave many families legal access to exotic surroundings and to the promise of abundance, which unfolded in a peculiar state of suspension: somewhere between Poland and North Africa. Marta Bogdańska is one of these “contract children” – she grew up between Warsaw and the Libyan town of Houn, within the parallel realities of Polish and Arab socialism.
In Warm Ice Cream, Bogdańska returns to that period of her life without indulging in sentimental reconstruction. She works with the archive of her mother, Dorota Jacynicz-Bogdańska, treating family photographs as anchors of memory. In her collages, she reinterprets these images, juxtaposing childhood recollections with adult awareness of historical and political contexts, reflecting on an identity formed across geographical and cultural divides. What once seemed to a child a coherent world lived “here and now” is now broken down and reexamined.
Memories are built on details. A Mirinda can, a postage stamp, a chewing-gum wrapper, a paper model car function as totems of foreign modernity. In the context of contract life, these objects symbolized a “world elsewhere” – bright, shiny, seemingly within reach in the Sahara, yet out of reach in Poland. Bogdańska does not preserve these images unchanged. She intervenes in them, echoing a child’s impulse to collect and to impose order on the surrounding world.
A childhood lived in the shadow of large-scale politics and infrastructural projects is neither mythologized nor exposed. It appears instead as a set of contradictions: the desert’s heat by day and its cold by night, the intensity of experiences and their provisional nature, the advantages and limits of both the PRL and Libya. Identity emerges from remnants – flavours remembered, afterimages, objects that, though materially insignificant, prove unexpectedly precious.
Bogdańska deliberately avoids nostalgia. Instead, she examines how childhood memory transforms “chocolate-like products” into the material of personal history. Without sentimentality, and with the precision of collage, she does not reconstruct the past but reveals how it was constructed.
Cover
We still keep our photos from Libya in one album. Most of them were taken by my mother between 1986 and 1988. The cover always seemed random to me — green, bland, completely mismatched with the photographs. Inside, there is a different world: desert, harsh light, intense colours and a different energy. This dissonance irritated me for a long time, but with time I grew to like it. Memory works in a similar way: it stores images that seem incompatible, but together they form a whole.
Second home
We lived in Houn, on a university campus built on the edge of the Sahara. The houses were almost identical, with equality and justice everywhere. The space was orderly, but it only took a few minutes by bike to find yourself outside of it — in the desert, with no points of reference.
Desserts
Food was one of the first areas where I learned that everyday life can look completely different, but function very similarly.
Warm ice cream was Poland. In communist times, dessert did not have to be a great delicacy to be enjoyed. It was enough that it served its purpose and was made from available ingredients. And warm ice cream did not need a refrigerator, did not melt, was cheap and practical.
In Libya, ‘chips’ replaced ice cream. My mum dried pasta in the sun and then fried it in deep oil. That’s how our ‘chips’ were made: crispy, salty, completely unlike anything I had known before.
Tennis
The tennis court was an improvised space. The lines did not always match, the surface was uneven. We played without even noticing. The rules were negotiable. This way of functioning — based on compromise and adaptation — was inherent to those times and places.
Ball
In one photo, we are at the Polish seaside, and you can see an inflatable ball with the Coca-Cola logo. In another, there are tennis balls. The ball itself was a mundane object. The logo carried the promise of a world that existed elsewhere, but could sometimes be touched.
In Libya, Western products were available, while in Poland in the 1980s they were a Pewex luxury. Play remained the same everywhere. The differences were in the packaging, not the experience.
Star burst – lemon
Warsaw’s Ursynów district was under construction. The desert was in constant motion. Concrete and sand are transitional materials. One symbolises a planned future, the other a potential one.
Gum and other sweets, with their wonderful colourful packaging, were the links between these landscapes. They could be transported, teleported from one order to another. Today, I see in this combination a clash of two worlds: late socialism and Western consumer aesthetics.
Mushrooms
In Poland, we used to pick mushrooms and dry them on a string. Picking mushrooms was an organising activity. It required attention, patience and the ability to recognise shapes.
In Libya, illustrations and stamps served a similar function. Images replaced direct experience. In childhood, both ways of learning about the world had the same status. What mattered was that something could be named and preserved.
Collage remained one way for me to organise the world — through juxtaposition, not analysis.
Vegetables
Photos from a Warsaw garden and illustrative depictions of vegetables on stamps. Some are random and imperfect, others are orderly and schematic.
The garden in Warsaw was chaotic, awakening and dying to the rhythm of the seasons. Vegetables existed in it as something you could touch, you could get dirty with the soil.
Libyan stamps depict abstract plants enclosed in frames. In a child’s perception, both orders had a similar status. Both seemed equally real.
Star burst – cherry
Winter in the Polish mountains and summer in the Sahara existed in parallel. Snow and sand were two versions of the same intensity.
Memory does not segregate experiences according to climate or geography. It preserves them according to repetition and emotion. For me, it is a record of a childhood devoid of a hierarchy of places.
Double bubble
In the 1980s, collecting was a common strategy. I myself collected wrappers, cans, bottle caps, stamps, stories from bubble gum, and handmade paper model cars.
Everything in the collection became a treasure. Today, it is only and as much as my private archive.
Maoam
I remember the flavours as a palette of colours. The colourfulness of the packaging was more important than what was inside. The wrapper acted as a promise. In reality, such intense graphics were something unique and seductive in communist Poland. What remains is the memory of the difference between the visual promise and everyday experience
Green pipeline
In Poland, water was most often discussed in the context of holidays – the sea, lakes, rivers. In Libya, the topic of water was constantly present. I saw stamps and illustrations depicting the Great Man-Made River project – a system of pipelines transporting water across the desert. It was only later that I understood the scale of this undertaking and its political significance. For a child, it was all too abstract. Nevertheless, the topic of water stayed with me – the awareness that it is the most precious thing.
Star Trek
The bombing of Libya by the United States in April 1986 was brought home to us in Houn through images: special editions of stamps, symbols, official photographs. At the time, I did not understand the political context or global tensions. For me, war was an illustration – just like a science fiction series.
Hot and cold
The desert can be treacherous. During the day, it radiates heat, and at night, it rapidly loses warmth. It was there that my hands truly froze for the first time. Sand and snow ceased to be opposites. They became different variations of the same bodily experience in the landscape.
Elephants going to church / PWGS43P
The drawings were made on my father’s technical paper, intended for work but perfect for play. The lines of infrastructure mingled with imagination.
Before I could describe my situation, I tried to draw it. It was the first way of organising a world that did not fit in one place.
Marta Bogdańska
visual artist, photographer, filmmaker, educator, and cultural manager.
She holds degrees in philosophy and gender studies from the University of Warsaw. She lived and worked in Lebanon for eight years, where she studied in the Homeworkspace program at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut. She also completed studies at the Akademia Fotografii in Warsaw and attended Szkoła Ekopoetyki, Szkoła Patrzenia at IFF, and Instytut Otwarty at Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw.
Her artistic practice engages with social and political issues, archival work, uncovering marginalized histories, and creating new narratives using various media and artistic processes, including photography, video, sound, and text. She values collaboration and participatory approaches and is interested in public spaces and their accessibility.
She currently works with the Museum of Photography in Cracow as an artist-in-residence. She has also been awarded a residency at Valimage Tavers in France for 2026.
Bogdańska has received numerous awards, grants, and residencies in Poland and abroad, including Artist Meets Archive #4 at Internationale Photoszene Köln, Instytut Studiów Postnaturalnych in Madrid, Landskrona Foto in Sweden, Nida Art Colony in Lithuania, Gasworks in London, and Botkyrka Konsthall in Stockholm. She won the first edition of the national grant program Artystyczna Podróż Hestii, resulting in her solo exhibition W oku patrzącego at Instytut Fotografii Fort (5 December 2024 – 16 February 2025).
Her book SHIFTERS (published by Fundacja Sztuk Wizualnych and Landskrona Foto) was selected by PHotoESPAÑA as the Best International Photography Publication of 2022. It was also nominated for the Kassel Dummy Award, Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award Arles, MACK First Book Award, and received a distinction in the contest for the Best Polish Photography Publication of the Year. She received a special distinction in the Wojtek Falęcki Award (2025).
Together with the Archiwum Protestów Publicznych, she won the SPOJRZENIA Award in 2021 and was nominated for the Polityka Passport Award the same year. She also received the Konrad Pustoła Scholarship and the Selma Lagerlöf Visual Arts Scholarship in 2021. As the winner of Photo-Match 2020, organized by Fotofestiwal Łódź & Krakowski Miesiąc Fotografii, she held a solo exhibition at the ASP Gallery in Kraków in 2021. After winning the PIX.HOUSE Talent of the Year 2020 competition, she published PLAINTEXT, which received a distinction in the contest for the Best Polish Photography Publication of 2020.
Her works and films have been shown worldwide, including at CSW U-jazdowski, Fotografia Europea in Italy, Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle (MBAL) in Switzerland, CIRCULATION(S) in Paris, the FOTOFESTIWAL in Łódź, and the Biennale Fotografii in Saloniki.
About the project
The online exhibition module was developed as part of the project “Digital Photography Center Fort: Digital Transformation of the Resources and Offer of the Fort Institute of Photography”, co-funded by the European Union under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (KPO) through the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) – NextGenerationEU, as part of investment A2.5.1 “Program to Support Entities in the Cultural and Creative Sectors to Stimulate Their Development.”