Monika Marchewka's How to be eaten unfolds as a seductive and uneasy banquet of belonging: a body of work shaped by the desire to be welcomed into a social world, and by the cost of making oneself consumable in order to enter it.
The exhibition extends Marchewka's distinctive visual language of dreamlike, emotionally charged worlds in which beauty and vulnerability coexist. Her paintings often shimmer with softness and allure, yet beneath their surfaces lie tension, traps, and the possibility of unfulfilled promises. In this sense, How to be eaten feels like a further chapter in her ongoing narrative: a moment poised between invitation and rejection, when decorative fantasy begins to curdle.
The title itself operates in two directions at once. It sounds practical, almost instructional - like a recipe, a domestic manual, or a guide to etiquette. Yet it also carries an intimate violence: not how to eat, but how to be eaten. With this shift, the subject moves from host to dish. The body enters the logic of presentation, plating, appetite, and waste. Marchewka's works suggest that the rituals of self-stylisation - the acts of embellishing, sweetening, softening, and over-preparing oneself for others - may also become rituals of self-erasure.
A key point of departure for the works in this exhibition is Marchewka's fascination with vintage recipe illustrations, where dishes are presented in idealised, theatrical, and often impossible arrangements. In these images, display overtakes nourishment. Marchewka draws on this visual language as a script for social performance: not how something tastes, but how it must appear in order to be deemed worthy. Within that gap between flavour and presentation, care and performance, the emotional core of the exhibition emerges.
Here, the still life is no longer simply a symbol of abundance. It becomes a record of labour, anxiety, and excess - an arrangement made to be admired, then abandoned. The ants and bees that recur in the exhibition are not incidental details but active presences. They embody appetite without etiquette, attention without invitation. Arriving where the human community has failed, they become the only audience that truly accepts what has been offered.
In doing so, they introduce time and entropy into the work. Sweetness attracts. Surfaces begin to break down. Compositions collapse. What was once staged as a social image is transformed into an ecological event.
Tender and unsettling in equal measure, How to be eaten is an exploration of hospitality, performance, and the fragile line between being welcomed and being consumed.
