Prologue is the first part of A Choreographic Exhibition by choreographer and performer Ula Sickle, which will occupy the NW building on 3 and 4 May 2025 with live performances and video works from 2018–2024. In her interdisciplinary choreographic practice, Sickle draws on visual art, music, and contemporary culture at large to explore everyday life under the conditions of late capitalism. In Prologue, the artist focuses on the central role of photography in her movement practice.

On the ground floor of NW, several blue exercise mats are arranged on the floor; others wait in piles for possible use. Grey vinyl benches are scattered around the space. On the walls hang photos taken during the rehearsals for Free Gestures, a live exhibition presented at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw in 2018. For Free Gestures, Sickle invited five fiction writers to reflect on how ideologies manifest themselves in our gestures and language, asking what a possible countergesture could be. The authors share the perspective of the same generation that grew up in the 1990s—the ideological heyday of neoliberalism. 

In Prologue, the scenography is visible, and two of the scripts are reprinted. With careful attention to detail characteristic of her practice, Sickle creates a space of prolonged attention—the photographic images exists in dialogue with each other, with the space and the scenographic environment of Free Gestures, all elements waiting to be activated by the viewer. Prologue is a choreographic situation, an exhibition where meaning emerges from interplay: the collisions, echoes and resonances between different voices, viewpoints, and presences.