Gdynia is a city born of imagination. It was created as a project of the future  – modern, open, and turned towards the world. Its architecture, public space, and port were meant to respond to the needs of its residents and the young Polish state, but also to shape a new way of life: healthier, more conscious, based on faith in progress, education, and community.

For decades, this story built the city's identity. Today, however, we return to it with greater distance. The grand narratives and simple promises of a better tomorrow no longer sound as convincing as they did a century ago. Instead of a single history, questions arise about those who remained out of frame, about the costs of development, and about the ideas that were meant to lead to emancipation but sometimes became tools of control and exclusion.

The presented works look at the heritage of modernism not as a closed chapter of history, but as a living substance. Architecture here becomes a vessel of memory, and former visions of the future – a point of reference for contemporary imaginations and doubts. Alongside a fascination with form, technology, and design, there is a reflection on the fragility of social order and on how easily the idea of progress can give way to conflict, violence, and chaos.

A hundred years ago, Gdynia's future seemed like a project that could be planned. Today we know that no vision is free from errors, dead ends, and unforeseen consequences. The exhibition thus looks not only at what we inherited from modernity, but also at the questions that return with every era of acceleration, uncertainty, and change. Perhaps that is precisely why the past remains one of the most interesting tools for thinking about the future.

Agata Abramowicz