Why Glass, Why Venice: Shape of Breath

Curatorial essay by Monika Turczyńska

On fragility, transmission and the conditions that allow matter to endure.

Glass seems self-contained only when we encounter it finished. A vessel, a pane, a surface holding light can appear to have arrived as a complete object. Yet glass is one of the least autonomous materials. It exists because a chain of conditions holds: mineral, heat, furnace, time, breath, gesture, tool, memory, workshop and transmission. Remove one link and the form does not simply change; the possibility of the form itself begins to disappear.

This is why Venice matters.

The fragility of continuity

Venice, and the history of glassmaking associated with Murano, make visible something contemporary culture often hides: craft is not stored in objects. It survives in continuities. A technique remains alive because someone knows how to read a furnace, control temperature, anticipate the behaviour of matter, recognise the instant before collapse and pass that knowledge to another person. Glass therefore depends not only on material and heat, but on a relation between generations.

Tradition is not an archive. It is a living chain. And a living chain can break.

The fragility of glass is therefore not only physical. There is another fragility: the fragility of the conditions that allow glass to exist at all. Knowledge can disappear. Workshops can close. Skills that seem permanent can cease to be transmitted. What we call heritage can remain visible as an image while the living practice that produced it quietly vanishes.

To preserve glassmaking is not simply to preserve beautiful objects. It is to preserve the invisible network that makes those objects possible.

Breath as form

MINORIA: Shape of Breath enters Venice through this threshold. The project does not treat glass as a decorative motif, nor does it attempt to translate painting into glass. Glass becomes an interlocutor: a material whose existence makes visible the dependence of form on forces that are themselves difficult to see.

Before it becomes an object, glass is unstable matter. It depends on heat, timing, gravity and force. In glassblowing, breath enters this matter from within. The invisible changes the visible. Air, which has no shape of its own, becomes capable of producing shape.

Breath is perhaps one of the most elementary figures of MINORIA: almost absent, yet decisive; invisible, yet capable of sustaining and transforming form. It exists only as passage. We do not possess a breath. At the moment it becomes complete, it has already left us. Breath is presence occurring through disappearance.

Glass retains the consequence of that passage. It can remember breath after breath itself is gone. It can remember heat after the fire has disappeared. The finished object becomes a visible residue of forces that are no longer present.

The image after the force

The work of Józef Krzysztof Oraczewski has long occupied a related territory. Across more than five decades, his painting and spatial practice have resisted the idea of the image as a closed, self-sufficient surface. Forms emerge through collision, repetition, masking, tension and transformation. An image does not merely represent something. It carries the pressure of what preceded it and the possibility of what may still appear.

Within Shape of Breath, this becomes particularly significant. The work is encountered not as an illustration of glass, but alongside the logic that glass reveals: form as a temporary stabilisation of forces; visibility as the residue of processes that are no longer directly accessible; presence as something produced through relation.

The mask, recurrent in Oraczewski’s recent work, intensifies this question. A mask both reveals and withholds. It creates a visible surface precisely by introducing a distance between what appears and what remains behind it. It is simultaneously presence and obstruction, identity and interval. In the language of MINORIA, it belongs to the threshold where the visible cannot be separated from what escapes visibility.

Venice: permanence as work

Venice adds another layer to this relation. The city itself appears permanent largely because the labour that sustains it is easy to forget. Its continuity depends on structures, repairs, skills, materials, decisions and forms of knowledge that must be renewed again and again. Venice endures not because permanence is natural, but because continuity is continuously produced.

The same is true of glass tradition. We easily assume that what has existed for centuries will continue to exist. But duration is not a guarantee. Naming something heritage does not secure its future. A craft survives only if there is a next hand. A language survives only if it continues to be spoken. A city survives only if it continues to be inhabited, repaired and remembered.

This may be one of the quiet problems of our time: we have learned to preserve objects more readily than the relations that made them possible.

What art preserves

MINORIA begins where what appears obvious loses its certainty. It is interested in the trace rather than the monument, in emergence rather than completed definition, in the interval in which something has not yet fully become visible or has already begun to disappear.

From this perspective, preservation cannot mean freezing a tradition into an untouchable image of the past. A living tradition survives through activation. It must pass through another body, another hand, another time. Continuity is not repetition without change. It is the capacity of a structure to remain alive while entering new conditions.

Art can participate in this process because it preserves differently. It does not necessarily preserve facts. It can preserve tensions, absences, gestures, ways of seeing and forms of attention. It can retain what historical description leaves outside its frame.

Glass remembers fire. It remembers breath. Venice remembers the hands and systems that continually prevent it from becoming only an image of itself. Oraczewski’s work remembers forces that resist reduction to a single visible meaning.

Shape of Breath brings these forms of memory into relation.

The question is therefore not simply: what is made of glass? The more urgent question is: what has to remain alive for glass to continue to exist? And, beyond glass, what invisible structures must remain intact for any form — artistic, cultural or human — to endure?

Perhaps the shape of breath is precisely this: not an object, but a relation briefly made visible.

MINORIA: Shape of Breath

Józef Krzysztof Oraczewski

Concept & Curatorial Project: Monika Turczyńska

A Space Gallery, Venice

12–20 September 2026

Opening: 16 September 2026, 7 PM

Presented during The Venice Glass Week 2026