Psychobodies, not Figures
Conference on Maria Jarema

Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
Wybrzeże Kościuszkowskie 22

Friday, September 15
5–7 pm
Potential histories and ruptures

Opening session and discussion with the participation of:
Agnieszka Dauksza, Natalia Sielewicz, Éric de Chassey
moderated by: Magda Szcześniak

Agnieszka Dauksza
Maria Jarema and the avant-garde of failure

In my presentation, I will focus on Maria Jarema’s strategies of destructing her own workshop. I will examine the tension between the complementary tendencies of obsessive craft training and practicing carelessness, creating poor quality objects, transitional and makeshift forms. I thus propose to look at the artist as someone subverting the order, albeit from a position of powerless resistance. Civil disobedience and affective engagement are coupled with strategies of distance, withdrawal, and interrupted or limited participation. An attitude of obstinate powerlessness does not necessarily mean surrendering the symbolic field. I will be reading it as a consciously reiterated act of obliterating traces, multiplying the image and disrupting the status. My goal is thus to present failure as a method of creating art and Jarema’s avant-garde as a strategy of survival.

Natalia Sielewicz
Between disposition and declaration. Maria Jarema’s vibrant materialities

In my presentation, I will explore Maria Jarema’s oeuvre through the prism of a new formalist reading, highlighting her groundbreaking political project that went beyond identity politics. I will ask, therefore, what possibilities are offered by Jarema’s insubordination in the current political stalemate. If forms are at work everywhere, as literary scholar Caroline Levine suggests, then I would like to propose that in her abstract affective forms, Jarema paid close attention to the significant difference between disposition and declaration, to the idiosyncratic muscle memory of our actions and the power of intentionality. What if we treated Jarema’s affective planes and colour fields as a reservoir of information, moody and temperamental, ready to be activated by other planes? My study of Jarema’s postwar work and political grammar of rhythms, penetrations and grasps will be informed by the new formalist approach proposed by Caroline Levine in her book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, in which she considers the field of aesthetics, affects and politics and argues that there is no politics without form.

Éric de Chassey
Maria Jarema’s travels to Paris and encounters with contemporary international art (1937–38, 1947, 1956–57)

Maria Jarema’s works from the 1940s and 1950s show many similarities with the post cubist abstraction that had become the lingua franca of the art world at the time. Yet they also immediately appear very specific. Historiography has tended to explain that specificity by events in her personal life or political commitments, in terms that are usually too generic to fully make sense. As a tentative way to approach her specificity, I propose to focus on her several trips to Paris (October 1937–February 16, 1938; May–July 1947; December 1956–September 9, 1957), where she was able to experience first-hand what was currently shown. The information on these trips is quite scarce and general but, by delving into the content of the exhibitions that we know she saw, it could be possible to map out a contextual foil against which to better understand her own developments. The question will not be to reassess the centrality of Paris vs. the periphery of Cracow or Warsaw but rather to horizontally provide counterexamples that can act as interpretive tools.

7pm
Performative reading of Maria Jarema’s selected writings by Marta Malikowska in the scenographic setup by Zuza Golińska inspired by Jarema’s unrealized set design.
Costume based on design by Maria Jarema was executed by Gosia Golińska.

Saturday, September 16
11am–1pm
Maria Jarema as a transnational and antifascist figure

Session and discussion with the participation of:
Dorota Jarecka, Klara Kemp-Welch, Andrij Bojarov
moderated by: Iwona Kurz

Dorota Jarecka
Maria Jarema. Let the Rail Splitter Awake

In 1945, Maria Jarema joined the Polish Workers’ Party. This formation was the heir to the Communist Party of Poland, although this heritage was not openly admitted. Jarema, born in 1908, had collaborated with the communist left before the war, and after its end she made an accession to the movement, which she believed was synonymous with progress. The victory of the Allies, the collapse of the Nazi superpower and the shaking of imperial powers along with colonial wars – these processes led to the mobilization of the left across Europe. In Poland, an additional catalyst for radicalization on the left was the return of Polish anti-Semitism, which was met with protest from intellectuals. In my presentation, I will show this moment of radicalization. I will ask about its connection to the change of Jarema’s artistic language, her return to avant-garde forms and adaptation of the language of sculpture in painting. I will read these decisions as an artistic response to the demand for modernization posed by the new cultural policy in Poland emphasizing moments of constructivism and reconstruction. The key years for the artist are 1946–1949. They will determine her later choices and attitude. In the presentation, I point to Tadeusz Kantor’s and Maria Jarema’s adaptation of Pablo Neruda’s poem Let the Rail Splitter Awake (1949) as the symbolic meeting point of avant-garde, internationalism, Marxism and surrealism.

Klara Kemp-Welch
Maria Jarema and the politics of simplicity

Speaking in Nieborów in 1949, Maria Jarema argued that “socialist realism was conceived as a simple reaction of resistance against the excessive refinement in art and the ‘playfulness’ recently indulged in by many of Europe’s less creative artists. Socialist realism should therefore have become the pursuit of simplicity. And what did it become instead? Mandated by non-artists, its ties with art were severed, and it came to represent the gauche bungling of kitschmongers.” My paper takes Jarema’s damning statement as a starting point for a broader discussion of the idea of simplicity in relation to international debates about avant-garde art’s relevance to the “man on the street.”

Andrij Bojarov
Where is Lviv?

My presentation will be devoted to Lviv and its artistic circles. It was in Lviv that the first exhibition of the Grupa Krakowska took place. I will examine both the significance of the Lviv art scene and the role it plays in current narratives of Ukrainian art history. My main objects of analysis will be three exhibitions of modernist Ukrainian art, which are currently on show in Europe (one of them also includes contemporary works). I will also present hitherto unknown works and documents from the Margit family archives, the archive of Roman Sielski and the archives of the “artes” Group (the only ones who remained in Lviv and the USSR). Amongst these I will focus on female artists from the interwar period. I will mention the Association of Polish Female Artists [Związek Artystek Polskich], established in 1910, whose three creators stayed in Lviv after the war, as well as the Lviv ZZAP (not to be confused with ZZPAP!) and ZAUR. My presentation will also examine the so-called engagement of the “artes” group, including their factorealist program, the Ukrainian ANUM association and the journal Novi Szljachy. I will also talk about the 1936 Congress of Culture in Lviv. I see many contradictions and dualisms in their attitudes. To summarize, the presentation will examine post-war Ukrainian artists, and the fates of leftist ideas in the face of unimaginable repressions.

2pm
Presentation of the “Catalogue of complete works by Maria Jarema”
Barbara Ilkosz

Presentation of the Catalogue of complete works by Maria Jarema, which includes works from public and private collections. The catalogue comprises all known works of Maria Jarema, supplemented by identificatory information and details regarding their institutional or private owners. Each entry is accompanied by a photograph. The catalogue is divided into four categories: sculpture, painting, drawing and graphic art and a common section for set, costume, and fabric design, as well as sketches. Each category contains chronologically ordered works. Lost works constitute a separate category. The program used for designing the catalogue allows for a quick search for objects, correcting data and an easy identification of works according to chosen categories: alphabetic and chronological order, as well as technique.

3–5 pm
War, occupation, trauma

Session and discussion with the participation of:
Luiza Nader, Susan Best, Tomasz Szerszeń
moderated by: Natalia Malek

Luiza Nader
War. Maria Jarema’s response to cruelty

I will analyze artworks and objects by Maria Jarema created between 1939 and 1945. I will focus on such works as War II, Germany, Beach, as well as still lives and toys created by the artist during this time, juxtaposing them with statements and visual testimonies from the same period by artists such as Leopold Buczkowski, Halina Ołomucka or Mieczysław Wejman, among others. I will reflect on the issues of artistic response and responsibility imposed by the experience of brutality, the sight of crime and death, taking as my starting point the concept of the “implicated subject” in violence (Michael Rothberg). Following the thought of Judith Butler, I will ask the following questions: violence circulates, but is its constant movement indispensable? How do we counter violence without repeating its logic? I will try to respond to them by interpreting the wartime works of Maria Jarema.

Susan Best
The experimental exercise of freedom. Maria Jarema’s avant-garde art

The phrase “the experimental exercise of freedom” was coined by Brazilian critic Mario Pedrosa to describe the type of optimistic forward-looking art made under conditions of political repression. He used the phrase to describe the work of Brazilian artists like Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Helio Oiticica whose work during the dictatorship period continued with aesthetic experimentation. In the late 1950s, these artists began a radical rethinking of abstraction, searching for a model of abstraction that connoted living or liveliness. The parallel with the work of Polish artist Maria Jarema is very striking. She too creates abstract works in the 1950s that speak of vitality, rhythm and movement and that practice the experimental exercise of freedom. As a member of both the first and second Kraków Group, she was part of groups that sought to promote modern art while resisting the curtailment of avant-garde experimentation. The language of abstraction in this context speaks to a refusal to reduce art to utilitarian ends. In this paper I want to examine the liveliness of her abstract works from the 1950s considering in particular how her work can be analysed using Daniel Stern’s idea of vitality affects.

Tomasz Szerszeń
Towards formlessness. Constellation Jarema / Piasecki

Marek Piasecki visited Maria Jarema’s studio in Cracow as a high school student, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The gaze of the young “not-yet-artist” falling on the work of Jarema, who was in a transitional moment, “starting from scratch,” will be a starting point for considering the relational, constellational history of art, as well as – perhaps above all – the theme of formlessness. It appears both in Jarema’s monotypes and in Piasecki’s attempts at “chemical painting” from the mid-1950s onward. In both cases, a peculiar destruction of form could be associated with a reflection on the materiality of the work, a perspective of poverty, a rejection of verticality, an opening to chance, and to the ephemeral and imperfect. Did these gestures gravitating toward formlessness have a political dimension as small “acts of nonconformity”?

6pm
Performative reading of Maria Jarema’s selected writings by Sandra Korzeniak in the scenographic setup by Zuza Golińska inspired by Jarema’s unrealized set design.

Sunday, September 17
11am–1pm
Feminist legacy of Maria Jarema

Session and discussion with the participation of:
„Pavilionesque”, Joanna Kordjak, Matylda Taszycka, Dana Kavelina
moderated by: Agata Pyzik

Joanna Kordjak
Theatre of revolutionary effigies. On emancipatory potential of dolls in Maria Jarema’s oeuvre

In my presentation, I will examine the use of dolls, puppets and mannequins in Maria Jarema’s art. In the 1930s, as part of her political engagement against social inequities and fascism, the artists created satirical puppets, which were used in political plays addressed to workers. Dolls were used for different means in the plays of the Cricot theatre, co-created by Jarema both before and after the war. The subjectification and fragmentation of the female body can be read as the artist’s play with the cliches of femininity, the erotization and fetishization of the female body and art, and with stereotypical images of the “new woman.” In these plays, Jarema did not use physical dolls. Rather, she transformed the body of a living actor into a puppet. To achieve this effect, the actors were made to wear abstract costumes, limiting their movements, as well as face-covering masks, face and body make-up. It is important to note that the artist herself also played the role of the doll. Jarema’s dolls, together with her use of cabaret, varieté and circus aesthetics, possessed a political, emancipatory and subversive potential. All this allows us to situate Jarema’s performative activities in relation to the work of European female Dada artists, such as Hannah Höch, Emmy Hennings and Sophie Taeuber.

Matylda Taszycka
„Against monuments”? The monumental legacy of Maria Jarema

The presentation will focus on the Fryderyk Chopin fountain in Kraków, completed in 2006 by Wanda Czełkowska based on Maria Jarema’s model from 1948–1949 (from the collection of the National Museum in Kraków). This monumental and dynamic public art project functions as an alternative to traditional monuments. In this presentation, I will treat Jarema’s conception and Czełkowska’s execution of the project as a starting point for a reflection on Jarema’s avantgarde heritage and its relation to the work of an artist of a younger generation – a fellow Kraków sculptor and member of the Second Kraków Group. I will use this example to ask about the possibility of inscribing both artists into a matrilinear history of art.

Dana Kavelina
Doll parts. Maria Jarema’s legacy versus current forms of resistance

Dana Kavelina is an artist, currently based in Lviv, where she is completing a stop-animation film about Lviv pogroms during the second world war. For the last two years, she has been working on a long-term project about the situation of women in totalitarian and post-totalitarian conflicts: the Holocaust in Lviv, the Chechens’ deportation, the Bosnian war and the war in Donbas. In her work Kavelina brings an artistic component into active citizenship and street protests. The subject matter of her artwork is personal and historical trauma, vulnerability, perception of war outside the mainstream narratives. In her work she often works with self-made dolls and puppets. Kavelina will discuss her work in relation to Jarema’s legacy in Lviv’s avantgarde and various forms of resistance towards war and trauma.

3–5pm
Closing discussion with the participation of:
Joanna Mytkowska, Jana Baumann, Hanna Wróblewska, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Iris Müller-Westermann

The working languages of the conference will be English and Polish. Simultaneous translations will be provided in both languages.

Participants:

Agnieszka Dauksza, Ph.D. – assistant professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University, editor of "Teksty Drugie", author of the books: Jaremianka. Biografia (2019), Afektywny modernizm (2017), Klub Auschwitz i inne kluby.
Rwane opowieści przeżywców (2016, 2021), Kobiety na drodze. Doświadczenie przestrzeni publicznej w literaturze przełomu XIX i XX wieku (2013). She edited, among others, the volumes: Maria Jarema: wymyślić sztukę na nowo i Świadek: jak się staje, czym jest. Winner of, among others, the Upper Silesian Literary Award "Juliusz", the "Gryfia" Literary Award, the Teresa Torańska Newsweek Award, the START Award of the Foundation for Polish Science, the Adam Włodek Award, the "Polityka" Science Award, NCN and NPRH programmes, the Kraków UNESCO City of Literature Award, the Cultural Scholarship of the City of Gdańsk; finalist of the "Nike" Literary Award.

Natalia Sielewicz is an art historian and curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. In her exhibitions and essays, she addresses the issues of feminism, affect culture, biopolitics, and technology. The curator of the exhibitions: Fedir Tetyanych. The Neverending Eye (2022), The Dark Arts. Aleksandra Waliszewska and Symbolism of the East and North (2022, co-curated together with Alison Gingeras), Agnieszka Polska. The One-Thousand Year Plan (2021), Paint also known as Blood. Women, Affect, and Desire in Contemporary Painting (2019), Hoolifemmes (2017), an exhibition problematizing performativity and dance as tools of female resistance, the exhibition Ministry of Internal Affairs. Intimacy as Text (2017) on affect and the poetics of confession in literature and visual arts. Sielewicz also curated Private Settings (2014), one of the first institutional exhibitions examining the impact of Internet 2.0 on the human condition in the age of late capitalism, and the exhibition Bread and Roses. Artists and the Class Divide (2015, with Łukasz Ronduda).

Éric de Chassey, Ph.D. is director of the French National Institute of Art History (INHA) in Paris and professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the École normale supérieure in Lyon, France. Between 2009 and 2015, he was Director of the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici. He has published extensively on the work of Matisse, US and European art, transatlantic cultural relationships, and the visual culture of the second half of the 20th century, especially in relationship with counter-culture and politics. His latest books, both published in 2017 (and yet to be translated), are Après la fin. Suspensions et reprises de la peinture dans les années 1960 et 1970 (Klincksieck) and L’abstraction avec ou sans raisons (Gallimard). He has also curated numerous exhibitions, accompanied by catalogs, including La Répétition. Un choix dans les collections du Centre Pompidou (Metz, 2023-2025) ; Luc Tuymans – Appartement 3 pièces (Fontainebleau, 2023) ; Le désir de la ligne. Henri Matisse dans les collections Jacques Doucet (Avignon, 2022) ; Ettore Spalletti. Il cielo in una stanza (Rome, 2021); Alex Katz: Floating Worlds (Paris, 2021); Le surréalisme dans l’art américain, 1940-1970 (Marseille, 2021); Sauvages nudités : Peindre le Grand Nord (Peder Balke – François-Auguste Biard, Anna-Eva Bergman) (Fontainebleau, 2019); Ligne forme couleur. Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) dans les collections françaises (Avignon, 2018); Images en lutte. La culture visuelle de l’extrême-gauche en France (1968-1974) (Paris, 2018); Jean-Luc Moulène. Il était une fois (Rome, 2015); Andrzej Wroblewski, Recto/Verso (Warsaw and Madrid, 2015); Painting or How to Get Rid of It (Rome, 2014); Jean-Marc Bustamante- Pieter Saenredam, Villa Medici (Rome, 2012); Poussin e Mosè. Dal disegno all’arrazo (Rome, 2011); Europunk: The Visual Culture of Punk in Europe, 1976-1980 (Rome, Geneva, Charleroi, Paris, 2010- 2013); Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres / Ellsworth Kelly (Rome, 2010); Ils ont regardé Matisse, Uneréception abstraite, États-Unis/Europe, 1948-1968 (Le Cateau-Cambrésis, 2009); Alex Katz: An American Way of Seeing (Tampere, Grenoble, Kleve, 2009); Repartir à zéro (Lyon, 2008-2009); Stroll On! British Abstraction in the Sixties, 1959-1967 (Geneva, 2005-2006); Kelly-Matisse: Plant Drawings (Paris and Saint Louis (MO), 2002); Made in USA: L’art américain 1908 - 1947 (Bordeaux, Rennes, Montpellier, 2001-2002). He is currently working on exhibition projects on Djamel Tatah and Henri Matisse (Nice, 2024), the French art scene since the 1990s (Montpellier, 2024), Georges Mathieu (Paris, 2025) and Ellsworth Kelly (Fondation Maeght, 2026). In 2022, he was elected chair of the International Network of Research Institutes in Art History (RIHA) and currently chairs the editorial board of the international project “The Visual Arts in Europe: An Open History” (EVA).

Magda Szcześniak, Ph.D. – Assistant Professor in the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw. Her research interests include politics of representing social classes and class conflicts, as well as visual identity politics. Author of Normy widzialności. Tożsamość w czasach transformacji [Norms of Visibility. Identity in Times of Transition, 2016] and Poruszeni. Awans i emocje w socjalistycznej Polsce [Feeling Moved. Upward mobility and emotions in socialist Poland, 2023], co-author of the two volume publication Kultura wizualna w Polsce (Visual Culture in Poland, 2017). Two-time grantee of the Fulbright Foundation and the National Science Center, recipient of the scholarship for outstanding young scholars of the Polish Ministry of Higher Education and Science, winner of the "Polityka" Academic Award. Editor of the journal "View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture".

Dorota Jarecka, Ph.D. – art historian, literary scholar, assistant professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Author of exhibitions and texts in the field of social history of art and visual culture. In 2021, she published Surrealizm, realizm, marksizm. Sztuka i lewica komunistyczna w Polsce w latach 1944–1948. Co-author of Erna Rosenstein's series of exhibitions at the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw (2011), at the Art Stations Gallery in Poznań (2013) and at the Xawery Dunikowski Museum in Warsaw (2014) and the book by Erna Rosenstein. Mogę powtarzać tylko nieświadomie / I Can Repeat Only Unconsciously (2014). Co-editor of books about artists: Krystiana Robb-Narbutt. Rysunki, Przedmioty, pracownia (2012), Natalia LL. Doing Gender (2013) Ewa Zarzycka. Lata świetności / Heyday (2016). In 2013, she published It's Hard, an interview with Anda Rottenberg. Since 2016, she has been running the Studio Gallery in Warsaw, where she initiated, among others, a program of exhibitions related to the history and collection of the Studio Gallery in Warsaw, opening the gallery to international cooperation, political, social and gender issues.

Klara Kemp-Welch, Ph.D. is Reader in 20th Century Modernism at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She is the author of Antipolitics in Central European Art. Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule 1956-1989 (London: IB Tauris, 2014), Networking the Bloc. Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965-1989 (Cambridge Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 2019) and co-editor of A Reader in East-Central European Modernism 1918-1956 with Beata Hock and Jonathan Owen (London: Courtauld Books Online, 2019). She is currently writing a monograph on contemporary art, migration and mobility in the European Union.

Andrij Bojarov – visual artist, independent curator and researcher. Trained as an architect, from the late 1980s/early 1990s active as an artist initially having working with large-format painting. At that time he became pioneer of Ukrainian video-art and turned to the field of conceptual photography, taking part in group and individual exhibitions in Tallinn, Lviv, Warsaw, Lodz, Poznań, Kyiv, Berlin, Amsterdam etc. The artist using strategy of appropriation and tries to open new areas of interpretation and perception for the viewer. He re-frames and multiplies images from the surrounding media-reality, both analogue and digital, creating surprising juxtapositions and extracting unexpected meanings. He’s living and acting in-between Ukraine, Poland and Estonia. From the 2000s focused on exploring largely neglected local histories of avant-garde art in the Central-European context, expanding and blending artist and curatorial work with research practices. The results included, among others, exhibitions in Poland: “Knowns-Unknowns” at the Zamenhof Center in Białystok (Interphoto Festival, 2017); “Montages. Debora Vogel and New Legend of the City” at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (2017); “Experiment! Masters of Photography at the Beginning of 20th Century in Lviv and Their Polish and Ukrainian Continuators”, Imaginarium/Forum Fotografii Galleries, Łódź (2018), Domowroty/Повернення/Homing. Włodzimierz Puchalski, International Cultural Center, Kraków (2022). Author of multiple articles in accompanying publications and catalogues of the exhibitions and research projects in Poland and Ukraine to which he contributed. Among them: Lviv. City, Architecture, Modernism. (Museum of Architecture, Wrocław, 2016), Avant-garde and The State (Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, 2018), Grupa Krakowska / Cracow Group 1932-1937 (National Muzeum, Wrocław, 2018 / National Museum Cracow, 2019), Футуромарення / Futuromarennia (exb. project on Ukrainian Futurism, Art-Arsenal, Kyiv, 2021 / KUMU, Tallinn, 2023) etc. Andrij Bojarov is a translator and editor of updated ukrainian edition of Piotr Łukaszewicz’s Union of artists „artes” /1929-1935/ and other stories of Lviv modernism (2021), new polish edition of the book with his afterword will be published by Ossolineum in September 2023.

Iwona Kurz, Professor – cultural critic and historian, professor at the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw. She deals with the history of modern Polish culture in the visual perspective, visual memory, and the issues of the body and gender. She is also interested in the issue of cultural policies and activities in culture.

Barbara Ilkosz – a graduate of art history at the University of Wrocław. 1985–2021 curator of the collection of contemporary painting at the National Museum in Wrocław. He deals with Polish art of the 20th century and the artistic environment of Wrocław in the interwar period. Member of the Association of Art Historians (SHS) and the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). 1999- honored with the 1st Prize of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage - Sybilla - for the exhibition "Maria Jarema (1908-1958)". Curator of monographic exhibitions and author of publications: - Maria Jarema (1908-1958), 1998; - Zapisy przemian. Krzysztof Musiał Collection, 2007; - Polish contemporary art from the collection of the National Museum in Wrocław, 2016; - Grupa Krakowska (1932-1937), 2018/2019. Curator of Polish art exhibitions, e.g. in Karlovy Vary (1989); Breda (1994) Szekesfehervar (1997); Dusseldorf (1997) and co-curator of exhibitions of foreign art at the National Museum in Wrocław: Oskar Moll. Obrazy i akwarele (from the Landesmuseum Mainz); Od Otto Muellera do Oskara Schlemmera. Artyści Akademii Sztuki we Wrocławiu 1900-1932 (from the Staatliches Museum in Schwerin); Malarz. Mentor. Mag. Otto Mueller and the artistic environment of Wrocław (with the Nationalgalerie-Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), 2020.

Luiza Nader, Professor – art historian, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Author of the books: Konceptualizm w Polsce [Conceptual Art in Poland] (2009) and Afekt Strzemińskiego. Teoria widzenia, rysunki wojenne, Pamięci przyjaciół – Żydów [Strzemiński’s Affect. A Theory of Seeing, War Drawings, In Memory of Friends—Jews] (2018). Her research is focused primarily on the XX century and contemporary art, with emphases on methodologies of art history, feminist theories, memory discourses, and theories of affect and trauma. Currently she is working on the subject positions of witnesses and observers in regards to reports and testimonies from and of the Holocaust. At the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw she co-directs (together with Marika Kuzmicz, PhD.) the Women’s Museum Laboratory: a series of seminars, workshops, lectures, exhibitions and events committed to feminist theory, practice and activism.

Tomasz Szerszeń, Ph.D. – cultural anthropologist and visual artist, essayist. Author of the books Wszystkie wojny świata (2021 - nomination for the Gdynia Literary Award, Literary Award of Meaning 2022, Academia Main Award 2022), Architektura przetrwania (2017 - Photographic Publication of the Year 2018, honorable mention), Podróżnicy bez mapy i paszportu (2015), editor of the books Oświecenie, czyli tu i teraz (2021, with Łukasz Ronduda) and Neorealizm w fotografii polskiej 1950-1970 (2015, with Rafał Lewandowski). Author of numerous research texts and literary essays published in magazines and anthologies. Assistant professor at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where he heads the Studio of Anthropology of Culture and Audiovisual Arts, editor of "Konteksty", co-founder of the magazine "Widok. Teorie i praktyki kultury wizualnej”. Co-curator of the exhibition What is Enlightenment? (2018, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw) and Transfert (2019, Galeria Studio). Scholarship holder of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, French Government, scholarship for outstanding young scientists of the Ministry of Education and Science, Artistic Scholarship of the Capital City of Warsaw. His artistic projects have been shown at exhibitions in Poland and abroad, e.g. at Paris Photo in Paris, at the Archeology of Photography Foundation, Studio Gallery, Nowy Theatre, Biuro Exhibition or Asymetria Gallery (Warsaw), Museum of Art in Łódź, as well as in France, Ukraine, Hungary and Israel. He is the author of the video and set design, as well as the co-author of the text for the performances of Ameryka (2022, Teatr Polski in Bydgoszcz) and Hiroshima/Love (2019, Biennale Warsaw), co-author (with Julia Holewińska and Radek Duda) of performative lectures shown, among others, in Kyoto Art Center (Japan) and Bienal Saco (Chile). At the beginning of 2024, Czarne publishing house will publish his new book devoted to the images of the war in Ukraine.

Susan Best, Ph.D. is an art historian with expertise in critical theory and modern and contemporary art. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Her book Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde (2011) won the Australian and New Zealand Art Association prize for best book. Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography (2016) was joint winner of the best book prize of the Australian and New Zealand Art Association. Her latest book on body art and performance is titled It's not personal: Post 60s body art and performance (2021). Currently, she is working on a history of Indigenous art in South East Queensland with Dr Bianca Beetson.

Natalia Malek – poet, curator of literary events, translator. A graduate of the Institute of English Studies at the University of Warsaw. The author of five poetry books, most recently she published "Obręcze" (2022). She regularly invites visual artists to collaborate on her books, including Basia Bańda, Joanna Grochocka, Anna Grzelewska, Dominika Kowynia. Winner of the Gdynia Literary Award 2021 and the Adam Włodek Award 2017, nominated for the NIKE Literary Award, the Wisława Szymborska Award and the Wrocław Silesius Poetry Award. Curator of the Spoken Word Festival Warsaw, an international festival of performative poetry, and Wiersze w mieście, a European festival of poetry in public space. Translator of poetry by Louise Gluck, Tyrone Williams, Sandra Cisneros, among others, lecturer of creative writing, interested in the connections between literature, especially poetry, and visual arts.

Joanna Kordjak is an art historian and curator at Zachęta - National Gallery of Art in Warsaw (since 2011). Her main research area is the art of Central and Eastern Europe of the 20th century, with particular emphasis on the post-war period. She is the author or co-author of several dozen exhibitions, such as Mapa. Migracje artystyczne a zimna wojna (2013), Antonisz: Technika jest dla mnie rodzajem sztuki (2013), Kosmos wzywa! Sztuka i nauka w długich latach sześćdziesiątych (2014), Zaraz po wojnie (2015), Polska - kraj folkloru (2016/2017), Przyszłość będzie inna. Wizje i praktyki modernizacji społecznych po roku 1918 (2018), Lalki: teatr, film, polityka (2019) Zimna rewolucja. Społeczeństwa Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej wobec socrealizmu, 1948–1959 (2021), Drugiej wiosny nie będzie… Dzieci i sztuka w XX i XXI wieku (2023), she is also an editor of accompanying publications and organiser of international conferences.

Dana Kavelina works primarily with animation and video, but also installation, painting and graphics. She graduated from the Department of Graphics at the National Technical University of Ukraine. Her works often address military violence and war, seen from gender perspective—especially with regard to the position of a victim as a political subject—as well as the distance between historical and individual trauma, and memory and misrepresentation. Her 2020 film Letter to a Turtledove was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in New York and will be featured in the exhibition Signals: How Video Transformed the World, opening on March 5, 2023. Her works were exhibited at the Museum Folkwang Essen, 2022; MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, 2022; Zionskirche, Berlin, 2022; Kristianstad Kunsthalle, Sweden, 2021; Kmytiv Museum of Soviet Art, Ukraine, 2019; and Closer, Kyiv, 2019. Kavelina’s films were screened at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin, 2022; HKW, Berlin, 2022; ICA LA, Los Angeles, CA, 2022; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 2022; and e-flux, New York, NY, 2021. Her animated film Mark Tulip, who spoke with flowers received the Special Jury Mention at the 2019 Odessa International Film Festival, and the Grand Prix of the 2018 KROK animation festival, Kyiv. Kavelina was based in Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine; since March 2022, she has been a refugee in Germany.

Matylda Taszycka is Head of Research Programmes at AWARE: Archives of Women Artists (https://awarewomenartists.com), Research and Exhibitions where she leads initiatives and directs research on women artists from the 19th and 20th centuries. A graduate from the École du Louvre in Paris, she worked at the Monnaie de Paris, before joining the Polish Institute of Paris as Head of Visual Arts. Taszycka is also the curator of Wanda Czełkowska: Art Is Not Rest exhibition at Muzeum Susch.

Agata Pyzik is an art critic and writer who publishes texts on politics, art, music and culture. She deals with the artistic and cultural history of Eastern Europe in the 20th century, the Cold War and the post-communist systemic transformation. Author of two books: the history of the Cold War Poor but Sexy (2014) and the autobiographical essay Dziewczyna i pistolet (2020). Her articles have appeared in Szuma, Dwutygodnik, The Wire, The Guardian, Artforum, frieze and others.

Jana Baumann, Ph.D. is a Senior Curator at the Haus der Kunst in Munich as well as an editor and author. She has curated various comprehensive retrospective exhibitions in Munich dedicated to artists such as Miriam Cahn: I as Human (2019), Franz Erhard Walther: Shifting Perspectives (2020), and Heidi Bucher: Metamorphoses (2021). Currently she is working on extensive exhibitions of Rebecca Horn (2024) and Sandra Vásquez de la Hora (2025). These projects, which trace the processual and performative qualities of a transdisciplinary artistic practice, are also research contributions to a medially expanded, gender-critical art historiography. Baumann has also been responsible for a series of new productions at the Haus der Kunst on contemporary transnational challenges, such as Holy Quarter by Monira Al Qadiri (2020), Kreb Core Cargo by Jo Penca (2021), Energy by Paul Kolling (2023), Masters by Shaun Motsi (2023), and Holy Water by Leyla Yenirce (2023). From 2014 to 2018, she was Curatorial Assistant and then Associate Curator in the Department of Contemporary Art at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main. An art historian, Jana Baumann received her doctorate from the University of Bonn in 2015.

Iris Müller-Westermann is currently a senior curator at Moderna Museet Stockholm, former director of Moderna Museet Malmö. Iris Müller-Westermann has worked at Moderna Museet in Stockholm since 1997. She has curated some of the Museum’s most widely acknowledged exhibitions: Louise Bourgeois – I Have Been to Hell and Back, Lee Lozano, Jutta Koether, Rosemarie Trockel, Munch By Himself, Max Ernst – Dream and Revolution, and, last but not least, the greatly acclaimed exhibition Hilma af Klint – A Pioneer of Abstraction, which toured Europe and was seen by more than one million visitors.

Hanna Wróblewska – art historian, curator. In 2010 - 2021, director of the Zachęta National Gallery of Art and commissioner of the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Curator of exhibitions at Zachęta, including Andrzej Wroblewski. Retrospective (1995), Panopticon. Architektura i teatr więzienia (2005), Revolutions 1968 (2008), Katarzyna Kozyra. Casting (2010), Marlene Dumas. Miłość nie ma z tym nic wspólnego (2012), Sarkis. Tęcza anioła (2017). President of the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts, and Vice-President of the National Committee of ICOM POLSKA of the International Council of Museums. From 2022, deputy director of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum.

Julia Bryan-Wilson, Ph.D. is the author of Louise Nevelson's Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (Yale University Press, 2023) and curator of Louise Nevelson: Persistence, an official collateral event of the 2022 Venice Biennale. She also co-organized Histories of Women at the Museu of Arte de São Paulo in 2019, where she serves as Curator-at-Large.

Joanna Mytkowska is a curator and art historian. She is the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw since 2007. Previously, she worked as a curator at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. She co-founded the Foksal Gallery Foundation, where she worked between 2001 and 2007. In 2005 she curated the Polish Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale, exhibiting “Repetition” by Artur Żmijewski. Joanna Mytkowska curated and co-curated, among others: “Never Again. Art against War and Fascism in the 20th and 21st centuries” (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2019), Edi Hila “Painter of Transformation” (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2018), “Alina Szapocznikow, Sculpture Undone 1955–1972” (Centre d'Art Contemporain Wiels, Brussels; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art in New York, 2012–2013), “Les promesses du passé” (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2010). She is the editor of the publications “Henryk Stażewski. Ekonomia myślenia i postrzegania” (2006) and “Edward Krasiński” (1997).

Marta Malikowska – actress, performer, singer. In 2005 she graduated from PWST in Kraków. In 2006-2009, actress of the Contemporary Theater in Szczecin, 2009-2015 actress in the Contemporary Theater in Wrocław, 2016-2017 actress in the Polish Theater in Bydgoszcz. Since January 2017, the freelancer lives and works in Warsaw. Currently, he collaborates with Teatr Nowy, Teatr Rozmaitości in Warsaw and Teatr Gorki in Berlin. Her artistic achievements include over 80 roles in the theatre, film, series and music videos. Major awards: In 2006, she received an award for her film debut for the role of Anka in "Przebacz" directed by Marek Stacharski at the Gdynia Film Festival. In 2008, she won the 1st acting award for the role of the Bride in Wyspiański's "Wesele", directed by Anna Augustynowicz at the National Competition for the Staging of Stanisław Wyspiański's Works. Twice nominated for the Wrocław "Warto" Award. Laureate of the "Świeża krew" 2015 competition organised by the Polish Theater in Bielsko Biała for the "Dzika" project. In 2016, the Award of the Marshal of the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship. In 2017, an individual award at the 57th Kalisz Theater Meetings for the role of Henrietta Lacks in the play "Henrietta Lacks", directed by Anna Smolar. In 2018, she won the Palcówka competition, as part of which the play "Malina" was created, in the repertoire of the Studio Theater in Warsaw in 2020-2022. She created the character of Pazina in the best Polish series 2018 "Ślepnąc od Świateł" directed by Krzysztof Skonieczny. Co-leader of the band Malikowska and Brożek/album "Nasza Miłość" 2019.

Sandra Korzeniak – one of the most outstanding Polish actresses. She worked in the ensembles of the Stary Theater in Kraków, the Dramatic Theater in Warsaw and TR Warszawa. She created unforgettable creations in the performances of Krystian Lupa, Maja Kleczewsia, Michał Kotański and Paweł Miśkiewicz. Winner of many theater awards. For the role of Marilyn in the play “Persona. Marilyn" directed by Krystian Lupa, which - as you can read in the justification - "re-established the categories of acting truth and falsehood" - was awarded the Polityka Passport in 2009, one of the most important Polish awards. For the role of Mabel in the performance of Maja Keleczewska "Pod presją" she received, among others, The main prize for the best female role at the International Theater Festival Divine Comedy in Kraków (2018), the Golden Mask (2019) and the Audience Award and the second acting award at the Kalisz Theater Meetings (2019). His film credits include in the films "Sąsiady" by Grzegorz Królikiewicz, "Niewidzialne" by Paweł Sali, "Hiszpanka" by Łukasz Barczyk, "Trapaty 2" by Marta Karwowska, "Dziura w głowie" by Paweł Subbotka and in the series "W domu" by HBO directed by Krzysztof Garbaczewski and the latest TVN series directed by Bartosz Konopka. The following films are waiting for the premiere: "Las" directed by Joanna Zastróżna, “Dzień I noc”, directed by Kasia Machałek and Łukasz Machowski; “Bezwzględna cecha podobieństwa” directed by Izabella Gustowska and “Gęś” directed Maria Wider. In the latest film by Jan P. Matuszyński "Żeby nie było śladów " she played the main female role, playing the role of Barbara Sadowska.

Zuza Golińska is a multidisciplinary artist who explores the impact of architecture and public space on the human individual. Her art reflects on the way in which human physical and mental wellbeing is influenced by the psychology of space in the time of civilisational acceleration and late capitalism. In her work, Golińska frequently disrupts the clear-cut division between the functional and the aesthetic as she examines the influence of spatial forms on emotions and decisions of users. Zuza is a graduate of the Studio of Spatial Activities in the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, she wrote her master’s thesis under the supervision of Anda Rottenberg. In 2018, Zuza won the ArtePrize awarded by the ArteVue and Delfina Foundation in London and in 2022 she became one of the three winners of Dorothea von Stetten Art Award organized by Kunstmuseum Bonn. She presented her works in the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Yokohama Museum of Art, National Gallery in Prague and many others.

Sarah Crowner was born in Philadelphia; she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Upcoming projects include Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri, USA, (September 2023). Recent projects include a solo exhibition at The Instituto Bardi / Casa de Vidro & auroras, São Paulo, Brazil (2023); a major solo exhibition at the Amparo Museum in Puebla, Mexico as well as a site specific installation at the Chianti Foundation in Marfa, Texas (both 2022), an exhibition at KMAC Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, USA (2018); a participation in the 57th Edition of Carnegie International (2018); the permanent installation at the Wright Restaurant, Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017) and the solo exhibition Beetle in the Leaves at MASS MoCA, North Adams (2016). She has participated in various group exhibitions, among them Object & Thing at Long House, New York, and Los Angeles Country Museum, Los Angeles (both 2023), Hill Art Foundation, New York (2022), Museo de Arte De Zapopan, Zapopan, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (both 2021), American Academy of Arts and Letters (2018), WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Bruxelles (2013), the Jewish Museum, NY (2015), and MoMA, NY (2013), among others. In 2013 she participated in a major survey exhibition on abstract painting at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She was part of the 2010 Whitney Biennial curated by Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari. Her works have been shown at White Columns, NY, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, ICA in London, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, de Appel in Amsterdam, Culturgest in Lisbon (all 2009), as well as DAAD Galerie, Berlin (2008). Crowner designed the scenography and costumes for Jessica Lang's “Garden Blue“ with the American Ballet Theatre, NY (2018) as well as the scenography for a revival of Robert Ashley’s “Perfect Lives“ (2012), which travelled to Marfa, Texas and then on to venues in Europe.

"Pavilionesque" is an art magazine created by Paulina Ołowska, devoted to various aspects of contemporary art and theatre. It is also a form of an active archive that searches for and extracts previously unpublished archival materials related to theatricality, performance and marionette art - documentation, photos and texts.