2025
neon

Ala Savashevich’s No One Will Name the Streets After Us translates into light a phrase originally written on a wall in Warsaw. The artist preserves the original font and handwriting, giving an anonymous voice permanence and visibility. Words once taken from the street become a manifesto of collective memory – the voice of those who have remained nameless, marginal and unseen.

The title phrase reads at once as an accusation and a quiet statement of fact. In the public space of Gdańsk, as in most Polish cities, women remain almost invisible: of more than 1,700 streets, only a few dozen bear women’s names. Monuments, plaques and place names continue to compose a masculine map of remembrance. In this context, Savashevich’s neon becomes not only a reminder of the absent heroines but also a question – whose stories do we commemorate, and whose do we erase?

The work’s resonance is heightened by its location, directly beside a tank – a timeless symbol of military dominance and masculine heroism. The light of the neon contrasts with the darkness of the iron machine. Where the tank speaks of power and domination, the neon speaks of memory, absence and quiet resistance. In this confrontation, the artist does not offer opposition, but rather invites a conversation: about how space is shared, and how we might coexist with history by giving it new meanings.

ALA SAVASHEVICH is a visual artist from Belarus working with sculpture and video. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław and also studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Minsk. Since 2021, she has been a doctoral student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. Savashevich uses a variety of media, including monumental forms, video and performance. In her practice, she examines themes of collective memory shaped by the experience of authoritarianism and patriarchy. A particular focus of her work is women’s labour and female corporeality in the context of work.