Last month we found ourselves taking the lift to the eleventh floor of a dour Soviet-era block in Warsaw. Here, in 120 square metres of apartment-studio, artist Edward Krasiński lived and worked from 1970 until his death in 2004. The flat was both salon and refuge—an improbable clearing for cultural exchange. The space was once shared with his friend and mentor Henryk Stażewski, doyenne of the Polish avant-garde, who was given the flat in 1962 by a Polish communist government eager to polish its artistic credentials. When Stażewski died in 1988, his works and possessions were cleared away. What lingered were the ghosts: dangling wires, pale silhouettes where paintings had once hung. Into this emptied frame Krasiński projected his own life’s work, and the apartment became his great installation, a stage set upon which everyday things were conscripted into the play of art: a branch driven into the floor, a brass bell, a ladder, dried flowers, a toy mouse running up a cupboard door, snapshots of friends, taped stripes on the windows left behind by a visiting Daniel Buren. A total environment—at once provisional and deliberate—to be lived in, looked at, and never quite finished.

Throughout it all runs a single line. Krasiński stretched blue painter’s tape at a strict height—130 centimetres from the ground, around the level of a human heart. He stuck it across canvases and walls, furniture and photographs, the bathroom door—“I don’t know whether this is art,” he once shrugged, “but it’s certainly Scotch blue, width 19mm, length unknown.” The trademark line functions as both an incision, an embrace, and an absurd leveller binding disparate things into its continuous horizon.

Today the space—now called the Avant-Garde Institute—is administered by the Foksal Gallery Foundation. Nothing has been repaired or remade: instead it persists in a state of loving entropy. Among the medley of things, the blue tape still hovers at the level of the heart, or like a suspended mark of an imagined child’s growth, asking us to measure ourselves against both memory and time.