Focal Point Gallery presents the first UK institutional solo exhibition by Rafał Zajko. The Spin Off is a theatrical installation that reflects on memory, repetition, reappearance, cyclicality, preservation and pickling, following Zajko’s practice of world building. Spanning sculpture, installation, ceramics and fresco, a new departure for the artist, this presentation of an entirely new body of work will open on Saturday 22 March 2025 with a performance by members of Contemporary Elders, the Gallery’s 60+ group.
Zajko’s new works employ folklore, pop culture, and science fiction to reflect on the late-capitalist drive to eternally refresh the familiar – to ‘foreverise’. Coined by author Grafton Tanner, ‘foreverism’ is defined as a contemporary cultural movement aiming to excavate and elongate the past. Foreverisms include the reviving of trends, the remixing of classic songs, the expansion of cinematic universes, the reboot; the spin
off.
The first gallery contains Funny Games, Zajko’s largest work to date. This theatrical installation features modular platforms that house elliptical ceramic reliefs, egg-shaped chairs, and a towering egg totem, all designed to be reconfigured daily by the gallery staff through diagrammatic instructions. This work, which seems to hover within the space, draws from the spatial qualities of religious architecture and urban design, exploring themes of symmetry, repetition, and psychological possibilities of urban space. Drawing on Frederik Kiesler’s Endless Theatre (1916), a utopian theatre exploring the concept of endlessness, this sculpture also depicts infinite possibilities of presentation and use: as an artwork, set, stage and architectural intervention. Next to it, a miniature sarcophagus preserved in a pickle jar, ceramic kaiser rolls and eggs appear stored within The Larders, three cupboard-like sculptural objects which include reinventions of some of Zajko’s previous works.
Funny Games is also the backdrop for a performance created in collaboration with some members of Contemporary Elders, Focal Point Gallery’s local group of over-60s. All the performative, ritualistic actions taking place in the gallery, whether by performers, staff or punters, will be captured by a CCTV camera, live broadcasting the constantly evolving installation from a bird’s eye view.
Located in the second gallery is A Star Is Born, a striking, self-performing sculpture that comes to life through light and smoke. An evolution of the artist’s earlier work, Lazarus (2020), this piece explores the tension between nostalgia and progress – a central concern of foreverism. Where Lazarus relied on the artist’s hidden presence, using his vape to produce a slow, deliberate cloud of smoke, A Star Is Born is now
fully automated. This sculpture fills and empties itself in rhythmic intervals, exhaling smoke every half hour, no longer requiring the artist’s presence.
Zajko presents a series of frescos developed using raw pigments, drawn from the earth and laid using porous ceramic tiles. The incongruous presence of this ancient technique, used here by Zajko for the first time, further highlights the artist’s interest in non-linear cycles. The frescos reappear throughout the exhibition, alongside other recurring motifs; thus the object itself becomes a reference preserved, manifesting an internal feedback loop which engages at once the past, the present and the future.
This exhibition, part of FPG x Jerwood Presents, is made possible by a Jerwood Foundation grant, which has been awarded to Focal Point Gallery for 2024–25, with additional support from the Henry Moore Foundation. In Spring 2026 this exhibition will travel from Rafal Zajko’s first home in the UK – Southend – to Poland’s Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, the city where he spent his childhood.
About Rafał Zajko
Rafał Zajko (b. 1988, Białystok, Poland) is an artist based in London. Zajko was recently awarded Abbey Fellowship at British School at Rome (Spring 2024). His sculptural commission Bread and Milk was shown in Autumn 2023 at Kunshalle Wien in Austria. Recent solo exhibitions include Clocking Off at Queercircle (2023), Song to the Siren at Cooke Latham Gallery (2022), Amber Waves at Public Gallery (2021), Resuscitation, Castor Projects, London, UK (2020); We Were Here/My Tu Bylismy, Galeria Im. Slendzinskich, Białystok, Poland (2019); Unputdownable, White Cubicle, London (2018). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including London Open 2022 at Whitechapel Gallery, New Contemporaries 2021 at South London Gallery, X Museum, Beijing, China (2020); TJ Boulting, London, UK (2020); Bold Tendencies, London, UK (2020).