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Zuzanna Czebatul’s work is defined by an exacting study of the complex interactions between power, ideology, and their cultural forms of expression. Harnessing monumental relics, infrastructures of commemoration, and architectural interventions, she analyzes how political systems engender an aesthetic of hegemony. Her works address the largely concealed mechanisms that shape social realities and cultural identities, and challenge fundamental principles such as durability, creation, and stability, contrasting them with disintegration and fluidity. With references to Western mechanisms of political rule, Czebatul uncovers the lasting import of cultural narratives that are increasingly being instrumentalized by nationalist tendencies. Her artistic interventions establish spaces that capture uncertainties of lived experience and open up fresh perspectives.

In All the Charm of a Rotting Gum, her first solo exhibition at DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, which opens on occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin, Czebatul presents a work that exemplifies these preoccupations. By subjecting the Pergamon Altar to conceptual reinterpretation, she creates a temporary discursive space that extends far beyond the original’s historical and iconographic significance. The altar itself will be hidden from public view until 2027 at the earliest due to comprehensive renovation works at the Pergamon Museum. Czebatul uses the opportunity to renegotiate the object: not merely as a symbol of imperial power, but as a platform for reflections on cultural heritage, processes of political appropriation and exploitation, and a history that figures prominently in Germany and that is mythologized in turn. In a dialogue with a second monumental work, a relief blending police riot  gear with the geometry of Christian sacred geometry , the exhibition sheds light on the articulation and representation of state power in history and the present.