Everyone knows that kind of evening when thoughts refuse to switch off and keep circling until morning. Katsia Smolskaya turned that state into an animation. She is a first-year MA student in Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, while also developing her practice in graphic design. In her work, she combines image and sound, exploring how they work together to shape emotions. She often draws from personal themes: home, memory and her relationship with the place she comes from, a place she no longer has direct access to after moving away. She likes to simplify complex experiences into clear, sometimes almost naive forms, creating enough distance to look at them differently and regain a sense of control.
At Kinomural she presents Pętla (Loop), an animation born directly from her experience of anxiety. The image is divided into nine puzzle-like sections, each representing a different trigger. A suitcase refers to migration and a move that turned out to be more difficult than expected; coins represent financial uncertainty; a phone reflects compulsive scrolling; breath captures the attempt to calm down during an anxiety attack. The remaining fragments explore fears of death, the future, the passing of time and the loss of safety. Each section has its own loop and sound layer, gradually overlapping to create a growing sense of chaos. The work becomes a reflection of how anxiety works: a cycle of thoughts and sensations that is difficult to stop completely.
