in the mind of the Polish artist Horacy Muszynski it can

Confronting. If you think you are ‘just’ visiting an art exhibition, you step out of the bright main hall of The Golden Drop in the stuffy and dark sleeping quarters of two Polish seasonal workers. The stuffy cubicle is just big enough for two beds and a closet filled with bright yellow work clothes. The sheets of one of the beds are stained, in a corner are some cigarette butts and empty liquor bottles. No window anywhere.

Horacy Muszyński recreated the sleeping quarters for Offspring 2022, the annual final presentation of post-academic art institution De Ateliers. Muszyński’s presentation doesn’t look like art, rather an informational exhibit in a company’s visitor center. Upon entering, there is a table ready where you are invited to spread a sandwich with honey and follow an audio tour of objects related to this honey.

In his own words, Muszyński created his exhibition at the invitation of Bio-korf, a Dutch company that researches alternatives to honey. The artist, himself Polish, was working on an exhibition about their 2009 pilot project with Polish workers. The aim of the pilot was to investigate a way of making honey that does not require bees. Not a bad idea in itself, to spare the honey bee. However, the solution the company came up with is pretty insane: extracting honey from human saliva.

Yes, you read that correctly. In the eighties, a professor Hendrik van den Berg discovered a special gene. People who have this gene can produce a sweet substance with their saliva, i.e. salivary honey. Or ‘The Golden Drop’, as Bio-korf calls the product. All producers have to do is keep nectar or pollen in their mouths for a long time. To then have the honey removed from the mouth in a rather unpleasant way, but that aside.

Are you thinking: never heard of Bio-hive and saliva honey? That’s right. This is (of course) fiction, Muszyński’s presentation is an art installation disguised as an informative exhibition. The audio tour guides you through the story of ‘The Golden Drop’, from the discovery of the gene to collaborating with a Chinese university and deploying Polish workers with the right gene. You’ll see a copy of the backpack that seasonal workers were sent into the fields to pollinate flowers and the bowls of mush they had to eat, tasteless on purpose so as not to suppress the taste of the honey.

The play with fact and fiction made me think of the Spanish artist Joan Fontcuberta. In 2015, he presented the fictional archive of a forgotten biologist who studied bizarre zoological mutations in the Science Museum. Snakes on legs, a monkey with wings, you couldn’t imagine that this professor would have found it. All fake of course, but faked perfectly by Fontcuberta, originally an advertising executive.

The fake of work The Golden Drop is not perfect. Little mistakes have crept in that pull you out of the illusion, language mistakes like “children’s honey” instead of “children’s honey” on a jar label. But the story Muszyński tells here is so layered that I like to condone it. Fake news, climate change, labor exploitation: the installation taps into all kinds of big themes without feeling forced. Plus, halfway through the audio tour, I grabbed my phone. Just google it: has saliva honey ever been researched?