It Was the Best End of the World

"The double-digit date format, It Was the Best End of the World. Machines were said to begin counting time from zero, which was expected to trigger blackouts, banking failures, and breakdowns in nuclear power plants. The Y2K crisis was looming, yet for the moment we were still living in the ‘seventh month of 1999’ foretold by Nostradamus.
A field, a bicycle, a ball, games, contests for the longest tire skid after braking, climbing a cherry tree, swinging back and forth.
I felt sorry for Ada and for Nintendo, because I would never finish playing Mario. Apart from that, I regretted nothing."

The exhibition by Natalia Legutko is the culmination of her doctoral research at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. It weaves together intimate fragments of memory with larger historical narratives, creating a story suspended between personal childhood recollections and the anxieties of an era that promised both technological collapse and new beginnings. By revisiting the atmosphere of the late 1990s, the artist reflects on the fears surrounding the millennium bug and contrasts them with the carefree experiences of a child at play.

In her artistic practice, Legutko turns to narrative drawing and, above all, to the language of comics. She uses sequential images and concise text not only as a means of storytelling but also as a tool that mirrors the accelerated rhythm of today’s communication. By combining the visual immediacy of illustration with the suggestive power of fragmentary narrative, her work highlights how private stories resonate with collective memory. The seemingly small details of childhood—games with friends, the materiality of objects, the thrill of play—become a lens through which broader historical tensions are reframed and made tangible.

This exhibition invites viewers to enter a double perspective: that of a child immersed in the present moment and that of an adult who reads these fragments against the backdrop of technological anxiety, cultural transformation, and the passage of time. The result is a space of reflection, where nostalgia becomes a critical tool for understanding how memory shapes both individual and shared experience. Legutko shows that even the simplest gestures of childhood carry the weight of cultural meaning. Her drawings remind us that memory is never neutral but always reconstructed, layered, and shifting. The exhibition asks whether the end of the world might sometimes be imagined less as a catastrophe and more as a transition into another form of life.

Supervisor: Prof. Bogusław Bachorczyk, PhD
Assistant Supervisor: Dr. Jakub Woynarowski**