Orwell’s World – how do we read 1984 today?
An exhibition at the Biblioteka Elbląska, Elbląg, Poland
24th Sept – 6th November 2026
Sarah made a piece of new work for this touring exhibition which is now on show at the Biblioteka Elbląska.
More than 75 years have passed since the first edition of 1984, and since the year the novel takes place, more than 40. That’s enough time to confront the Orwellian vision of the future with the reality we live in today.
In 2024, the Museum of Art Books in Łódź invited artists to participate in the “Orwell’s World” competition. The task was simple only seemingly: to choose a copy of the Year 1984 and turn it into a work of art. The starting point was not only the novel itself, but also its actuality. Orwell described a world in which power controls citizens, interferes with their lives, language and way of thinking. Do we see similar mechanisms today? How do we respond to their manifestations? And what do we feel when we once again reach for a book written more than seven decades ago?
29 works by artists from different countries were submitted to the competition. Most of them took up the challenge of directly transforming Orwell’s book. Some of the works, on the other hand, were created as a free answer about the competition – for them the jury created a separate category.
The effects show how many possibilities the art book offers. Among the works were new cover projects, leporellos, book objects and various types of codes. One of the most unusual objects is the “robot” built from many covers of the Polish editions of the Year 1984. The exhibition is also accompanied by a collection of 18 editions of the novel, including the first English edition and the Paris edition from the period of censorship and martial law in Poland.
However, “Orwell’s World” is not limited to history and literature. The exhibition also deals with artificial intelligence. AI may reinforce some of the threats present in the Orwellian vision of the world, but at the same time it opens up completely new opportunities to use technology. This ambiguous potential is shown by works prepared specifically for the exhibition.
The success of the competition and the audience’s interest in its results meant that “Orwell’s World” did not remain a one-off event. The project will continue in the coming years under the slogan “NO LIMITS” – without restrictions imposed on the book, art and ways of interpreting the world that Orwell described.
