The Sacralisation of Darkness in Leszek Mądzik’s Final Exhibition

Abstract

In 2025, Leszek Mądzik – one of the most important representatives of contemporary auteur theatre – died. Like Tadeusz Kantor and Józef Szajna, he created a theatre of visual narration on the authorial Scena Plastyczna KUL (the Visual Theatre of the Catholic University of Lublin). Of the three, he went furthest in eliminating literary narrative and the actor, reducing the performer to the role of a phantom ‑actor.Shortly before his death, he managed to create an exhibition presented at the Silesian Museum in Katowice (21 June 2024–22 September 2025). On the one hand, it functioned as a retrospective of his fifty years of directing work; on the other, it
formed a hybrid of exhibition space and theatrical performance. In this way, it entered an interpretive current present in Polish scholarship that addresses the non‑obvious status of stage visuality.In the exhibition, Mądzik employed his characteristic strategy of leading the viewer into a space of intense visual expression, generated by the interplay of artefact ‑objects and phantom ‑actors immersed in darkness and gradually revealed through modulated light. He used original or reconstructed objects from performances such as Ikar (1974), Pętanie (1986), Kres (2020), Tchnienie (1992), Wilgoć (1978), Bruzda (2006), Zielnik (1976), Wrota (1989), and Lustro (2013).Objects, sculptures, and mannequins – removed from their original contexts and arranged in new configurations – acquired new symbolic meanings. The role of darkness in his works remains difficult to explain unequivocally: it functions bothas a practical tool for constructing the stage image and intensifying expression, and as a source of religious experience. Balancing on the border between religious and existential theatre, the director’s works continue to evoke strong emotions, especially among those who had the opportunity to experience them.