At the heart of Christian Jankowski’s exhibition “Heavy Weight History” was a project encompassing seven black-and-white photographs and a twenty-five-minute-long video realized in the summer of 2013 in Warsaw. Jankowski, in close collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, selected seven city monuments and organized a group of professional weightlifters to attempt to raise them. In this symbolic way, through a sort of sports competition open to the public, he proposed lifting the burden of the complex and turbulent history whose remnants lurk in every corner of Warsaw.

Downstairs was a dense, labyrinthine sculptural installation: a crowded maze of plywood structures, photographs, collages, sketches, wooden cutouts, and photocopies. This “Private View,” as Erik van Lieshout’s show as a whole was called, was seething with anger (I HATE MY FATHER stenciled on a white ground) and Oedipal details (a cutout face of the artist’s mother roughly glued atop the body of a model from a girlie magazine). Recurring throughout was the haunted image of a young man, flashing a peace sign and bearing an air of distant melancholy.

None of this quite prepared us for what was