Atlas of the Brain. The Polish Institute for Brain Research in Vilnius

At the turn of the 20th century, the human brain became one of Europe’s great scientific obsessions. New laboratories sought to locate intelligence, mental illness, individuality, and even genius within its material architecture, transforming brains into objects to be collected, measured, compared and pictured. These aims were often bound up with eugenics and dreams of improving the human race.

This exhibition returns to the largely forgotten Polish Institute for Brain Research in Vilnius, placing its history within this wider scientific and political field. Archive photographs, microscope preparations, atlases and documents are combined with contemporary artwork, exploring what archives cannot preserve: absence, myth, memory and desire. Rather than reconstruct the Institute’s lost archives, the exhibition asks how images produce knowledge and belief.

Its pursuit of material traces of genius eventually focused on one extraordinary specimen. At the end of this story lies its most famous, and still missing, object: the brain of Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935), one of the founders of modern independent Poland.