WARSAW.- Can film change the way we perceive reality? Following the White Tiger, an exhibition by Portuguese artist Jo鉶 Maria Gusm鉶 presented at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, invites visitors into the world of analogue cinema. The exhibition comprises a multichannel installation of the artist’s latest 16 mm films, created especially for the exhibition. The project explores the relationship between moving images and reality, encouraging reflection on how film shapes our experience of the world. Following the White Tiger is on view from 28 August to 2 November 2026.
Drawing on everyday situations and urban landscapes, Gusm鉶 transforms seemingly ordinary scenes into poetic reflections on perception, technology, and the act of looking. Working here exclusively with analogue film, the artist foregrounds the material qualities of the cinematic image, revealing how light, movement, and mechanical processes become inseparable from the ideas they convey.
The exhibition’s title refers to the artist’s recent film The School of the White Tiger (2024), as well as to the metaphor of the “paper tiger”, popularised by Mao Zedong during the Cold War. The Chinese leader used the term to describe the atomic bomb and imperialism – phenomena that inspired fear and appeared all-powerful, but which, in his view, concealed an inherent weakness. For Gusm鉶, this motif becomes a point of departure for reflecting on illusion – both the illusion inherent in the nature of cinema, which creates the impression of movement from still images, and the illusions involved in our perception of the world. Through his films, the artist encourages us to look closely at how images are made, how they shape our experience of reality, and how easily we can succumb to their suggestive power.
As the artist Jo鉶 Maria Gusm鉶 explains:
“There are regular tigers, striped ones, spotted ones, and those that are just plain paper tigers. Yet, these paper beasts possess all the stealth and cunning—perhaps even more so—than the real predators. Lurking in the forest, they crouch and pounce, flashing their tiger fangs to terrify us common folk working in the rice fields with our Bolexes.”
The exhibition presents more than a dozen analogue film works arranged across Zachęta's lower galleries. Projected using modified 16 mm projectors, the films form a spatial installation in which moving images unfold at different scales and rhythms. Reimagined as an abstracted martial arts dojo, the gallery becomes a place of observation and training, where viewers are encouraged to move freely between works and discover unexpected connections between them.
“The exhibition is a hypnotic celebration of cinematic materialism and movement, questioning the relationships between reality and representation as cinematic images adhere to the realm of the human, the technological, the animal, and the more-than-human,” the Podlaskie-based Californian curator Post Brothers describes. “It subjects ordinary phenomena to a ‘weirding module’ and satirically embraces a certain orientalism to not only critique notions of East and West, but also to confront binary thought processes and logocentrism in the histories of thought, perception, and politics.”
Among the newly produced works are films shot in Warsaw, including Broadcast, which turns cameras covering horse races into the exhibition's protagonists; Birds on Land, Mammals in the Sky, where images recorded at Warsaw Zoo disrupt familiar hierarchies between animals and their environments; and Light Cone, in which three overlapping projections reveal the material construction of colour and light. Across the exhibition, commonplace subjects—from trampolines and gas lamps to slices of buttered bread—become starting points for questions about technology, representation, labour, leisure, time, and illusion.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a public programme including artist talks, screenings, guided tours, and educational activities exploring analogue film, perception, and experimental cinema.
Following its presentation at Zachęta, Following the White Tiger will travel to Portugal, where it will expand in Porto through a special presentation at Sism骻rafo and a new work developed with students at the School of Arts at Universidade Cat髄ica Portuguesa. The project will culminate in a large-scale exhibition at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon in March 2027, accompanied by a publication featuring texts by the artist and curator.
Jo鉶 Maria Gusm鉶 (b. 1979) - the Lisbon-based artist who for more than two decades has developed an enigmatic and complex set of practices and meta-practices ranging from experimental analogue film to primitive photography techniques, encompassing sculpture and drawing and moving image installations, and extending to literature, exhibition making, and publishing. At the core of his practice lies a distinctive strategy of critical archaeology, in which he reactivates early image-making technologies to explore alternative ways of perceiving time, space, and reality. His films, photographs, and objects draw on literary references and metaphysical inquiries, evoking speculative and poetic worldviews rooted in art, science, and philosophy. From 2001 to 2018, Gusm鉶 collaborated with Pedro Paiva, forming an acclaimed artist duo that exhibited at premier exhibition venues internationally, and represented Portugal at the 53rd Venice Biennale and participated in the 55th edition of the event in 2013. Their work features in various international museum collections, among which the Museum Sztuki in Łodz, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof韆, MACBA, Centre Georges Pompidou, Tate Modern, SFMOMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Nouveau Mus閑 National de Monaco and the Museu de Serralves. Since 2019, he has pursued a solo career while also working closely with other artists as a curator, editor, writer, and purveyor of the publishing house Pato em Pequim.
Curator: Post Brothers
