Haunted House

May 10 – July 5

For her third exhibition with Albarrán Bourdais, Angelika Markul (Poland, 1977) presents a new film project titled “Haunted House”, which explores the medieval castle of Fougeret, known as the most haunted place in France.

Renowned for her large-scale installations that range from sculpture to video, Markul engages with themes such as memory, time, creation, and destruction. Her work blends science and fiction to construct myths that touch on fundamental questions. Driven by a desire not only to capture images but also to sculpt them—making the dark and hidden visible—the artist has filmed melting glaciers in Patagonia, dinosaur footprints in the Australian region of Broome, and even the city of Chernobyl, documenting the resurgence of nature amid ruins.

Told like a tale, Haunted House delves into the inner world of wonders inhabited by myths and fantastical creatures. Accompanying the film is a new series of wax sculptures inspired by the fauna of the French region, extending the projection into physical space. With this installation, Markul invites viewers to wander through the hallways of a mysterious castle, reliving childhood fears and fantasies—a monster under the bed, a pair of eyes watching in the dark, but also the sudden love for a frog or the desperate hope that love will arrive to break a curse.

Using cinema—the most ghostly of media—and employing camera angles freed from the laws of gravity, the artist weaves connections between past and present, evoking the belief that haunted houses retain the memory of those who once passed through them, becoming endless sources of ghost stories.

Complementing this set, a series of landscapes charged with metaphysical forces are presented, made from metal sheets and wax. In them, the artist creates organic surfaces that represent the landscapes that inspired her during filming. This series draws from her travels to Dubai and its desert environments, representing the vastness of sand.

Markul transforms the gallery space into a mystical, dreamlike world, accompanied by a musical composition by Wojciech Puś—featuring a symphony of crickets and a piano melody imagined and performed by Angelika Markul herself during the shoot.

With solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Contemporary Art Center in Buenos Aires, and the International Center for Art and Landscape in Vassivière, the artist also participated in the MoMA’s 2020 digital exhibition From Matter to Data: Ecology of Infrastructures with her film Bambi at Chernobyl.

A graduate in Fine Arts from Christian Boltanski’s multimedia studio, she has been awarded prestigious prizes including the SAM Prize for Contemporary Arts and the COAL Prize Art and Environment.